FROM THE GUEST EDITORS

“For the sake of a continent threatened by famine, I urge the European governments to end their opposition to biotechnology,” said President Bush to censure the European Union’s policy on agricultural biotechnology. His message has a clear ethical dimension: Europeans have the duty to support GM foods and crops, as this support would alleviate famine in Africa (and in other developing countries). Doubtful as it may be, this claim indeed illustrates how ethics is increasingly and explicitly addressed with respect to issues of agricultural and food policies at a global level. Of course, the ethical dimensions of such policies continue to exist, independently of the level of citizens’ concerns or of the level of international dispute on biotechnology or other trade issues. But the existence of widespread concerns or disputes over policies related to food and agriculture does increase the relevance of reflection on the underlying values and normative basis. At the same time, this does not necessarily entail that governments and other actors in the agrifood chain will gain a better grasp of how to tackle ethical issues, since responses to public concerns and responses to ethical issues are not necessarily equivalent. “Ethics as a dimension of agrifood policy,” was the central theme of the fourth congress of the European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics (EurSafe) in Toulouse, March 2003. The reasons for the choice of such a theme are straightforward, since ethical issues have popped up continuously in connection to several aspects of agrifood policy. These include, public support to farmers; environmental impacts and sustainability of agricultural practices; animal welfare, integrity and rights; patenting and benefit sharing of biological and genetic resources; private and commercial interests in public research; health and marketing claims over functional foods; international trade, equity, and development of the Third World; genetic engineering and its applications to food and agriculture; and so on. Several of these issues have been widely analyzed from an ethical point of view for quite some years. However, the interface between ethics and agrifood policy has not received the attention that it may need and deserve. EurSafe’s fourth congress brought together a wealth of participants and presentations on a diversity of agricultural and food ethical issues. Our task as guest editors would have been more difficult, were we to pick equally Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16: 525–529, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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among all subjects of these presentations. But our first criterion was straightforward: we were targeting those papers explicitly addressing the interface between ethics and agrifood policy, either at the local, national, or international level. We aimed for a special issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics that could bring in a specific focus on ethics as a dimension of policy. And, of course, we were also choosing from those papers likely to reach high standards of quality and innovativeness. Our editorial criteria thus do not do full justice to the richness of the congress contents, but we believe that we have achieved our goals concerning the theme and quality of this special issue. Our desired focus on ethics versus policy resulted in the two broad themes covered by the papers in this special issue: (i) functional foods; (ii) genetic modification and resources. This should not be surprising, as these themes are in the forefront of those issues of agrifood policy particularly prone to raise questions on the interface of ethics and politics. The debate over functional foods, understood as those foods claimed to have a specific health benefit for the consumer, is ongoing and far from an end. These foods are to be positioned in the twilight zone between nutrition and medicine, and they thus pose special challenges to conventional food policy. Should functional foods be strictly regulated or rather basically unregulated? Are they to be treated as any other food or rather as drugs? What impact might they have on social and cultural attitudes towards foods? How will consumers react to them, and how will these foods interfere with prevailing perceptions of healthy nutrition? The three papers on functional foods in this special issue address some of these central questions. Lotte Holm looks at the interface of ethics and food health policies from a sociological perspective, showing how lay and expert rationalities with respect to food and health may diverge. Holm argues that functional foods risk being counter-productive for public nutritional health, since they may blur traditional distinctions between food groups, they focus on details and single ingredients rather than on an overall balanced diet, and they may be perceived as tempting “fixes” for bad nutritional habits. Food, nutrition, health, and consumer policies will all need an ethical input to accommodate adequately these new products that mix health and food into a new market relation. Tatiana Klompenhouwer and Henk van den Belt deal with consumer policy, addressing the conflict that may arise between consumer sovereignty and consumer protection. In relation to functional foods, what policy should prevail? The promotion of informed choice of a basically knowledgeable consumer? Or rather the protection of a basically ignorant and negligent consumer? Giving that informed choice is not necessarily

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coincident with the healthiest choice, the right balance of these ethically pertinent but conflicting objectives may be hard to achieve. Drawing from present regulatory trends within the European Union, Klompenhouwer and Van den Belt alert us to what may amount to a conflict between respecting autonomy and some form of paternalism. The coupling of genetic tests with food health claims may result in a special kind of functional foods. Franck Meijboom, Marcel Verweij, and Frans Brom call them “genetically tailor-made diets,” as those diets will be suited to an individual’s genetic background. Meijboom and colleagues analyze the ethical dimensions of such diets for the individual, for society, and for food policy. They claim that informed consent and weighing burdens and benefits are key issues to take into account. They also show how tailor-made diets may affect personal identity, shared social and cultural meanings of food, and perceptions of health or disease. As the authors put it, even if such diets are not likely to shape food practices in the near future, it makes good sense to start analyzing their ethical challenges right now. Turning to GM foods and crops, it is obvious that they have launched a well-known major controversy at the national and international levels. This controversy is partially responsible for a stronger recognition of the links between food policy issues and ethical issues. As Dane Scott puts it, genetic modification is likely to become, “for better or worse, an epochmaking technology.” We add that the debate around it is likely to become an epoch-making controversy. In recent years, biotechnology has enriched immensely the ethical analysis of many issues pertaining to food, agriculture, technology, risk perception and evaluation, equity, and the patenting of life. One might think that most things have already been said on the ethical issues pertaining to GM technology, but we think that this special issue will show that it is not yet so. The influence of industry and commerce on the conduct of public science has often been an issue of ethical concern. Dane Scott’s paper addresses this concern in view of some of the major recent scientific controversies about genetic modification, in particular the one over finding transgenic DNA in Mexican maize landraces. The subsequent dispute among scientists followed a path that, according to Scott, reveals a serious breakdown in scientific discourse. Scott claims that the trend of increased dependence of academic biosciences on the biotechnology industry, which has happened particularly in the United States (but might likely follow in the European Union), is responsible for this acute crisis in trust over the scientific discourse on GM technology. May the creation of an academicindustrial complex be held responsible for the erosion of the traditional

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fiduciary role of public science? Is this complex introducing a new pattern of conflict and distrust among scientists that undermines science and scientific discourse? According to Scott, this is precisely the case. If he is right, very relevant ethical implications should follow for the policy of public science and research. In general, one might say that most arguments claiming that something is intrinsically objectionable about genetic modification have failed hitherto. Rather, extrinsic consequentialist approaches to GM foods and crops tend to be considered sound, although relying heavily on empirical claims. Assya Pascalev follows the ambitious approach of finding objectionable aspects of GM foods that are intrinsic, i.e., independent of empirical facts about the physical consequences of their adoption. Her approach is based on respect for the personal integrity of those people who – for a variety of fundamental values – reject GM foods. Pascalev claims that the current policy in the US on the issue amounts to a morally repulsive de facto coercion over food that cannot be solved by GM-free voluntary labeling schemes. She concludes that the ethical principles of informed consent, non-maleficence, and respect for integrity would rather imply policy measures towards mandatory labeling, strict control and regulation of GM foods, and even the secured provision of non-GM foods. It is interesting to notice how Pascalev’s approach brings the ethics-policy interface over GM foods very close to the ongoing US-EU policy divergences on the issue. Donald Bruce shares with Assya Pascalev an approach to GM ethical issues based on rights and virtues. Bruce compares the rights of organic farmers to have their crops protected from adventitious GM contamination, with the rights of other farmers to produce GM crops. He concludes that arguments for incommensurability fail ethically on both sides of the debate, implying that both GM and organic farmers have a conditional right to follow their own style of farming. This amounts to saying that morality demands the standards of purity and contamination of organic products to be set at levels compatible with the co-existence of GM and organic farming in the same region. Donald Bruce calls in the virtue of tolerance both for defining the moral duties of farmers, and for shaping the policies to enable the co-existence of conventional, GM, and organic farming. Biotechnology has also brought a new focus on ethical issues related to biodiversity and genetic resources. Genetic engineering thus fostered a conceptual enlargement of the potential instrumental value of such resources, and opened up the field and the debate on the patenting of life forms, on intellectual property rights, and on access and benefit sharing

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over biological resources and innovations. Tsioumanis and his colleagues address several of these issues by questioning the morality of the international policy governing genetic resources. In particular, they claim that the present patent system is largely molded to suit Western values and expectations, leaving open space for an immoral, albeit legal, biopiracy that does not reward the role of traditional knowledge in shaping the availability of genetic resources. Emphasizing the links between justice, environmental conservation, and sustainability, Asterios Tsioumanis, Konstadinos Mattas, and Elsa Tsioumani argue that the intellectual property rights system is in need of major changes to accommodate such ethically relevant principles as farmer’s rights, informed consent, and equitable benefit sharing, avoiding what may arguably configure new forms of “colonialism.” Their paper is an example of the links between ethics and policy at an international or global level. Readers of this special issue may notice that several points of contact emerge among the different papers that compose it, including between those that address functional foods and those that address genetic modification and resources. The social and cultural relevance of food, as well as personal identity or integrity in relation to food choice, are central to the papers by Holm, Meijboom et al. and Pascalev; labeling policy is addressed both by Pascalev and by Klompenhouwer and Van den Belt; the relevance of trust in independent public science is the main issue of Scott’s paper and is also addressed by Holm. As guest editors, we think that this special issue thus holds an internal coherence over what are some of the key issues in present agrifood policy with a particularly relevant ethical dimension. In a world keeping steadily on track towards a greater integration of human societies, it is likely that the perception of a renewed link between agrifood ethics and policy will become permanent. In fact, the shaping of a global society more dependent on the biosciences and on biotechnologies is arguably one of the ongoing trends foreseeable for this century. The richness of the issues related to agricultural and food ethics are well illustrated by the program of the fifth congress of EurSafe in Leuven (Belgium), September 2004 (see: http://www.eursafe.org). The central theme of “Science, Ethics, and Society” will structure this congress around issues of animal production, sustainability, food security and development, and the growing biological basis of the economy. Volkert Beekman and Humberto Rosa Guest Editors