On risk and regulation: Bt crops in India

Genetic engineering in agriculture raises contentious politics unknown in other applications of molecular technology. Controversy originated and persists for inter-related reasons; these are not primarily, as frequently assumed, differences over scientific findings, but rather about the relationship of science to 'risk.' First, there are inevitably differences in how to interpret 'risk' in situations in which there are no established findings of specific hazard; 'Knightian uncertainty' defines this condition. Science claims no method of resolution in such cases of uncertainty. Second, science has no claim about risk preferences in a normative sense. In genetic engineering, Knightian uncertainty is pervasive; declaring uncertainty to constitute 'risk' enables a precautionary politics in which no conceivable evidence from science can confirm absence of risk. This is the logic of the precautionary state. The logic of the developmental state is quite different: uncertainty is treated as an inevitable component of change, and therefore a logic of acceptable uncertainty, parallel to acceptable risk of the sort deployed in cost-benefit analysis in other spheres of behavior, dominates policy. India's official position on agricultural biotechnology has been promotional, as expected from a developmental state, but regulation of Bt crops has rested in a section of the state operating more on precautionary than developmental logic. As a result, notwithstanding the developmental success of Bt cotton, Bt brinjal [eggplant, aubergine] encountered a moratorium on deployment despite approval by the regulatory scientific body designated to assess biosafety.