The Philippines Supreme Court recently made a worldwide landmark decision, from a jurisprudential point of view, invoking for the first time ever the precautionary principle as a decisive basis for acting against GM crops.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, standard economic models assumed that people would act in a rational and predictable manner. These models are flawed, of course, for if modern psychology has taught us anything it is that we are massively complex beings who are ultimately in important respects not predictable, often not rational, and certainly often rational in ways that are judged irrational by ‘experts’. We are moreover (and this is less widely understood) not predictable not only in practice but also in principle: i.e. this is not a limitation that can be overcome.

As reported recently on The Ecologist, The Philippines has banned GM crop trials until further notice.

The GM-testing-mega-coprorations are going to have to find a new testing ground.

Advocates of GM lean heavily on the claim that GM is ‘science’. But this is itself a highly dubious assumption. GM is essentially a technology. It is more like engineering than science. And of course this is actually tacitly acknowledged in the very concept / framing of ‘genetic engineering’.

We need to be less fixated on the evidence, where the human world is concerned, and more determined to take up a precautionary stance.

The House of Commons Science and Technology select committee has just this morning published the results of its inquiry into genetically modified crops and our attitude to them within the EU.

We present a non-naive version of the Precautionary (PP) that allows us to avoid paranoia and paralysis by confining precaution to specific domains and problems.