Last week, I found myself sitting in an auditorium in Brussels—and listening to Europeans applaud genetically modified crops.
Yet it was no fantasy. I was at the 7th Forum for the Future of Agriculture —a one-day event by and for European farmers. Over a thousand were in attendance. Speakers who wanted to win a favorable reaction from the audience just had to put in a good word for GM foods. Biotechnology was a ready applause line.
This doesn’t mean the debate over GM foods in Europe is done. Acceptance still faces a significant amount of political and cultural resistance. But the global scientific community now agrees that biotechnology is an essential part of the solution to food and nutritional insecurity in the 21st century.
GM foods are a subset of a larger issue that separates the United States and Europe: regulatory harmonization. This is the push to create common standards across international markets, so that product approvals on one side of the Atlantic receive the benefit of the doubt on the other side.
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In other words, our regulations should work in tandem rather than in competition.
Read the full, original article: EU-US Regulatory Harmonization is a Problem Worth Fixing
