[matt_wulfeck]

> The U.S. government concurrently has criticized the fundamental prevention principal of the EU Consumer Centre which protects 500 million Europeans from consuming genetically modified food and hormone-treated meat.

Good for the EU. If only our government showed the same care for its own citizens.

[zavi]

> The U.S., for example, demands that statutory prohibitions on products to protect human health should only be allowed to be passed if it has been scientifically proven that these products really are harmful.

Sounds like a reasonable argument.

[skrause]

In a way the US is regulated by a high risk of expensive lawsuits with really high amounts of compensation if they harm someone. So a company will not release a product that might be harmful because they could end up paying hundreds of million dollars of compensation to harmed people.

These kinds of lawsuits don't exist in Europe, in the worst case a company will pay $10,000 to a single person. But there are other protections in place and if you take those away you will end up with much worse protection than the US has because this indirect regulation doesn't exist.

[nickpsecurity]

You should look up our pharmaceutical industry. They keep the risk down to a certain amount, forge the data with questionable methodology, make billions on the products, and then pay a fraction of that in settlements or whatever. Banking sector is similarly bad about stuff except with money instead of lives (most of the time).

Yes, they'll release a product that might be harmful. The tradeoff is whether they can get away with it in court. The Ford Pinto case is a classic example of that kind of thinking gone wrong. I suggest you look its details up to see how our boardrooms think on things. It was really bad. Least they paid for it.

[pizza234]

> In a way the US is regulated by a high risk of expensive lawsuits with really high amounts of compensation if they harm someone. So a company will not release a product that might be harmful because they could end up paying hundreds of million dollars of compensation to harmed people.

This is purely in theory, in particular for some industries and products.

C8 made lots of $$$ to DuPont, and it took 50+ years to be banned.

You can't prove, in a strict sense, that C8 caused harm to any given person. Also, you don't know that a product like C8 is harmful when you release it.

A company will release a harmful product very gladly, as long as it has a pool large enough of scientists, lawyers and PR professionals to keep the ball rolling for a long [enough] time.

[brute]

More reasonable than the alternative?

> "whereas the U.S. only bans them if people have already been harmed as a result of consuming said products"

I think those people harmed would disagree.

Also to "scientifically prove" something might not be as easy as it sounds. You may have a couple of studies that find a harmful effect, and then you have some (possibly industry-backed) studies that find no effect at all. You now have a strong hint, but no proof. At best it is "scientifically debated". Think of tobacco industry vs "smoking causes cancer", or oil companies vs "global warming is caused by humans".

[matt_wulfeck]

Wait until it's proven harmless or wait until it's proven harmful. Two different approaches and I personally think one is wiser.

[KMag]

Scientifically proving a thing to be harmless is a fool's errand.

The main arguments against GMO essentially boil down to that they may be harmful in ways we can't yet test for. Even if we had enumerated all the ways in which things could be harmful, we wouldn't know our list was complete. You might as well ban food that hasn't been scientifically proven not to harm invisible garden gnomes.

[mcv]

Science doesn't prove things. It provides likelihoods and most likely explanations.

So the real question is: should something only be banned when it's 99.5% certain that it's harmful? Is 50% chance of it being harmful okay? Or 80%? And why?

The EU prefers to err on the side of safety. The US prefers to err on the side of profit. I don't see why the US approach would be better.

[green7ea]

I can't up vote you enough because this is exactly it (that and many US companies using dodgy science since the bar is so low).

[Veratyr]

I disagree. Maybe the prohibitions being statutory is a bit strong but I think products should be proven safe before they're allowed.

The burden of proof shouldn't be on the government, it should be on the manufacturer, similar to how medicines require FDA approval.

[testrun]

How do you proof something is 100% safe?

[joesmo]

Unless you're the one that dies and becomes the scientific proof.

[green7ea]

Science isn't math, it can't prove anything. What it does is reduce uncertainties more and more until we become confident that it's likely to be right.

[thesimon]

Related to food: The German site says the US are pushing to remove the protected designation of origin. "Parma" ham could be manufactured in Kentucky, Camembert in New York and Champagne in California. Crazy.

[seqastian]

it is impossible to get this through the parliaments in europe.

[sago]

I suspect the US are very aware of this, and it is one of the reasons for the secrecy. They start with overly harsh demands, then can 'concede' back to a favourable position. Pre-seeding your concessions is important. If you publish those harsh demands to the citizenry of the other side, however, you're in danger of your negotiating partners losing their mandate as a result.

[tootie]

That's a matter of opinion. An opinion unsupported by evidence.

[KMag]

Furthermore, it's demanding proof of a negative. We can't prove that carrots won't attract swarms of malicious homosexual space aliens with a taste for human brains to Earth, and therefore should ban carrots because they can't be proven to be safe. Politicians in support of carrots should be shamed as being pro-gayzombpocalypse. Spread the fear!

The very reason we're creating GMOs for food is to reduce the resources (land, energy, fertilizers, water, etc.) needed for food production. The motivation of course is that lower resource usage means lower production costs.

Requiring unreasonable burdens of proof mean greater waste in our food production, but that side of things isn't a scary and therefore gets less consideration than the limitless possibilities of unknown harms that could come from GMOs.

There's some drop in the price of a hamburger below which I'm not willing to risk a Leprechaun extinction. However, I'm willing to risk extinction of Leprechauns, Yetis, and Loch Ness "monsters" in exchange for less land needed to grow my food, and fewer children being under-nourished. These are real problems that GMOs can help with.

[ptaipale]

In fact, if more "proof" for safety of food would be appropriate, it wouldn't be on GMO food but on organic, which is in fact responsible of the last big-scale food poisoning in EU, which killed over 50 people in Germany.

Imagine the hysteria if a GMO food item would have been involved in the chain of events!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_o...

[erikb]

Yeah, reading that my first assumption was that US citizens suddenly would also be against the details of TTIP.