Quando la precauzione fa male
Il CAST (il Consiglio per le Scienze e Tecnologie Agrarie) americano ha rilasciato un documento di analisi sul Principio di Precauzione, probabilmente il più innovativo e pervasivo tra i nuovi concetti che stanno alla base delle politiche ambientali, tra cui anche quelle che riguardano gli OGM.
Gli autori dopo aver analizzato la bibliografia disponibile sul tema hanno concluso che:
il Principio di Precauzione ha fallito come sistema di gestione del rischio, ed è ora passare oltre.
In particolare, spiegano gli autori:
As the record and case studies summarized earlier demonstrate, the PP is flawed. Without a workable definition and agreed-upon criteria for its application, the PP’s employment to date, including in the food context, has been dictated more by political influences than scientific factors. For example, governments have exploited the PP’s ambiguity and arbitrariness to adopt protectionist policies, and activist groups have used the PP to apply a double standard of higher scrutiny and demands for certain technologies of which they disapprove. Moreover, in many cases the PP has been applied or proposed to be applied in ways that may have the net effect of increasing overall health and environmental risks by impeding safety-enhancing technologies. Given these failures, it is not surprising that the momentum behind the PP is fading, and it has become clear that the PP will never achieve the consensus that its proponents had once envisioned.