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This book will make a significant contribution to the debate surrounding the effective regulation of biotechnology. The contributing authors assess how regulatory regimes can accommodate the many different and often conflicting issues to which biotechnology is giving rise to (including a very tainted public image). The book’s ultimate aim is to explore ways of designing a regulatory regime that takes heed of these different demands whilst, at the same time, answering to the imperatives of effectiveness and efficiency.

This book examines the EU regulatory framework in the Genetic Modification of agriculture and food to see how adequately EU law treats serious contestations about the development and use of GMOs. Since linkages between law, technology and public contestations could have a crucial dimension in the shaping of democratic societies, the space EU law provides for publics outside of the scientific experts to shape the regulation of GMOs becomes significant. By examining the employment of the precautionary principle and (the advices from) public bioethics committees in GMO regulation, this book examines the policy claim of public participation as a mechanism to represent and mediate public contestations about the use and regulation of GMOs.

This book explores the EU’s elaborate regulatory framework for GMOs, which extends far beyond the process of their authorisation (or not) for the EU market, embracing disparate legal disciplines including intellectual property, consumer protection and civil liability. The regulation of GMOs also highlights questions of EU legitimacy in a context of multi-level governance, both internally towards national and local government, and externally in a world where technologies and their regulation have global impacts.