[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Mass media fanned the flames.The head-wind calmed a little bit in 2000, when the EP plenary rejected the most con-tentious amendments, the Commission presented its package deal includ-ing the lifting of the moratorium, and the Council agreed with a delegationof powers to the Commission.For Unilever, this came too late: in May2000, it decided to end, for the time being, the production and trade in Eu-rope of products containing GMOs.Three months later the Swiss giant No-vartis followed this example.The food companies were weary of feeling thatthey were on the lower side of an unlevel playing-field.However, theyshould not have been surprised.The previous EU decisions on the 1990 Di-rective, transgenic maize and the Patent Directive had shown them amounting headwind that made the Commission, preparing its 1998 pro-posal, an open forum for conflict.All this was widely known, and shouldhave stimulated the food companies to become better prepared for theheadwind.Instead of the exit option, companies like Unilever could haveapplied the best practices of surviving in an unfriendly arena, for instanceas follows.A good stakeholders analysis could have revealed that the opposing coali-tion was far from unified.For example, the green movement was dividedinto a polemic European faction and a moderate Third World faction thatconsidered GMOs as the poor man s cheap fertilizer , better than chemi-cals.The health movement, partly organised in the European Public HealthAlliance (EPHA), was divided into a caring and a curing faction, the latteracknowledging the benefits of GMOs for patient groups.Other stakehold-ers had taken ambivalent positions, such as the consumer organisationBEUC that was not against GMOs, but concerned about consumer safetyand price-quality ratio.Traditional farmers were only partially orthodoxgreen peasants, averse to new technology, the rest were small farmers fear-ing stronger competition.Multinational food retailers, such as Carrefour(France), Sainsbury (UK) and Delhaize (Belgium), were divided by marketcompetition with both each other and alternative retailers like health foodstores.Last but not least, the Commission, EP and Council were notori-ously divided over the whole dossier.In short, the advocates of GMOs hadstrong enemies but also many potential friends around, and could haveextra: the gmo food arena 193 strengthened their own position by undermining the fragility of the oppo-nent coalition, by seducing ambivalent stakeholders to indifference or evendefection, and by creating a better collective platform of their own, withoutindifferent stakeholders like pharmaceutical companies or aggressive oneslike Monsanto.Proactive issue analysis could have provided many clues for all that.Atan early stage, the food companies could have promoted the controversialissues among their opponents, such as the poor man s fertilizer, medicalbenefits, price-quality benefits for consumers, crop benefits for small farm-ers, and market opportunities for health food retail.Then they would haverestricted their opponents room to build a broad coalition around the is-sues of environment and safety and reframed them as, for example, globalnutrition, agricultural development, public health, consumer welfare, eco-nomic growth, quality employment and environmental savings.Then theyalso might have found better loss-compensation than the lifting of a mora-torium that had no legal basis at all, for example EU research subsidies forlow-risk GMOs or a simplified admission procedure for new food products.Shortly after the game Unilever did push the latter successfully, not for itsGMO interests but for its GMO-free new margarine that lowers cholesterol.In the new 2003 European Food Safety Authority, it even managed to se-cure the chair of the Management Board.In an unfriendly arena, one should try to delay the process, as one is stillalive as long as love is not yet hanging.The companies should have made abetter time analysis for finding smart delays.For example, on the disputedGMO benefits for Third World countries, the companies could have lob-bied in those countries, and at DG DEV for a round of consultations withdeveloping countries; via Europabio, they could have mobilised patientgroups to lobby for exemptions that complicate the process.The menu ofdelaying techniques is really not short, as it ranges from actors to approach,factors to use and vectors to create.For example, the companies could haveelicited new research to confuse some opponents, challenged the Treaty ba-sis of the Revised Directive or evoked an early complaint from the WTO, allthat not for its own merits but as a means to win time.With anticipation, thecompanies could also have created a more cohesive platform of their own ingood time, without companies like Monsanto wanting to speed up the EUdecision process for having its new GMO products admitted, and thus di-viding the Europabio camp and helping their enemy.By boundary analysis, the companies could have created their last safe re-sort.In such an unfriendly situation they should have striven for a widen-ing of the arena.By provoking new issues and stakeholders, they might194 managing the eu arena have won at least more time and at most more benign issues and stakehold-ers.They could have reactivated, for example, the issues of stagnating em-ployment and global competitiveness that need innovative technology.That might have brought to their side the trade unions and the socialist par-ties fearing loss of employment to US producers.Even DG Social Affairsand DG Industry might have joined this coalition actively.The companiescould also have demanded that the precaution principle (if risk, no admis-sion), if adopted, should be applied, as a matter of legal fairness, to totallydifferent policy areas as well, such as to transport, chemicals, regional de-velopment and, not least, traditional agriculture.This might have broughtmany new stakeholders into the arena for fighting against the principle.The companies could even have linked their interests to the Agenda 2000,being decided in March 1999, on which the issues of employment andgrowth stood central.All the foregoing recommendations are hindsight wisdom, useful forlearning and anyhow illustrating the room to manage an unfriendly arena.Since 2002 much has changed.The EP has kept its moderate position, butDG SANCO (David Byrne) came to sit in the driver s seat on the food do-main and took the lines of traceability and labelling.DG AGRI (Franz Fish-ler) wanted controlled experiments with GMO in agriculture rather than afull prohibition.DG RTD and DG ENTER joined the troops actively on re-search and production.To open the EU market to new US GMO crops, theUS government continued its pressure through the WTO and directly onEuropean governments in the Council.In September 2003, the Commis-sion proposed its moderate regulations on GMO food and feed authorisa-tion (EC 2003/1829) and traceability and labelling (EC 2003/ 1830) to theParliament and Council.True enough, its crucial Standing Committee onFood Chain and Animal Health (SCoFCAH, comitology) often votesagainst Commission proposals, based on EFSA expertise, to allow newGMO crops and so enables Parliament and Council to overrule the Com-mission formally but, as always the case so far, neither the EP nor Councilcould produce a majority against these proposals and hence they all let (ac-cording to the rules of comitology) the Commission win and admit newGMOs willy-nilly [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Mass media fanned the flames.The head-wind calmed a little bit in 2000, when the EP plenary rejected the most con-tentious amendments, the Commission presented its package deal includ-ing the lifting of the moratorium, and the Council agreed with a delegationof powers to the Commission.For Unilever, this came too late: in May2000, it decided to end, for the time being, the production and trade in Eu-rope of products containing GMOs.Three months later the Swiss giant No-vartis followed this example.The food companies were weary of feeling thatthey were on the lower side of an unlevel playing-field.However, theyshould not have been surprised.The previous EU decisions on the 1990 Di-rective, transgenic maize and the Patent Directive had shown them amounting headwind that made the Commission, preparing its 1998 pro-posal, an open forum for conflict.All this was widely known, and shouldhave stimulated the food companies to become better prepared for theheadwind.Instead of the exit option, companies like Unilever could haveapplied the best practices of surviving in an unfriendly arena, for instanceas follows.A good stakeholders analysis could have revealed that the opposing coali-tion was far from unified.For example, the green movement was dividedinto a polemic European faction and a moderate Third World faction thatconsidered GMOs as the poor man s cheap fertilizer , better than chemi-cals.The health movement, partly organised in the European Public HealthAlliance (EPHA), was divided into a caring and a curing faction, the latteracknowledging the benefits of GMOs for patient groups.Other stakehold-ers had taken ambivalent positions, such as the consumer organisationBEUC that was not against GMOs, but concerned about consumer safetyand price-quality ratio.Traditional farmers were only partially orthodoxgreen peasants, averse to new technology, the rest were small farmers fear-ing stronger competition.Multinational food retailers, such as Carrefour(France), Sainsbury (UK) and Delhaize (Belgium), were divided by marketcompetition with both each other and alternative retailers like health foodstores.Last but not least, the Commission, EP and Council were notori-ously divided over the whole dossier.In short, the advocates of GMOs hadstrong enemies but also many potential friends around, and could haveextra: the gmo food arena 193 strengthened their own position by undermining the fragility of the oppo-nent coalition, by seducing ambivalent stakeholders to indifference or evendefection, and by creating a better collective platform of their own, withoutindifferent stakeholders like pharmaceutical companies or aggressive oneslike Monsanto.Proactive issue analysis could have provided many clues for all that.Atan early stage, the food companies could have promoted the controversialissues among their opponents, such as the poor man s fertilizer, medicalbenefits, price-quality benefits for consumers, crop benefits for small farm-ers, and market opportunities for health food retail.Then they would haverestricted their opponents room to build a broad coalition around the is-sues of environment and safety and reframed them as, for example, globalnutrition, agricultural development, public health, consumer welfare, eco-nomic growth, quality employment and environmental savings.Then theyalso might have found better loss-compensation than the lifting of a mora-torium that had no legal basis at all, for example EU research subsidies forlow-risk GMOs or a simplified admission procedure for new food products.Shortly after the game Unilever did push the latter successfully, not for itsGMO interests but for its GMO-free new margarine that lowers cholesterol.In the new 2003 European Food Safety Authority, it even managed to se-cure the chair of the Management Board.In an unfriendly arena, one should try to delay the process, as one is stillalive as long as love is not yet hanging.The companies should have made abetter time analysis for finding smart delays.For example, on the disputedGMO benefits for Third World countries, the companies could have lob-bied in those countries, and at DG DEV for a round of consultations withdeveloping countries; via Europabio, they could have mobilised patientgroups to lobby for exemptions that complicate the process.The menu ofdelaying techniques is really not short, as it ranges from actors to approach,factors to use and vectors to create.For example, the companies could haveelicited new research to confuse some opponents, challenged the Treaty ba-sis of the Revised Directive or evoked an early complaint from the WTO, allthat not for its own merits but as a means to win time.With anticipation, thecompanies could also have created a more cohesive platform of their own ingood time, without companies like Monsanto wanting to speed up the EUdecision process for having its new GMO products admitted, and thus di-viding the Europabio camp and helping their enemy.By boundary analysis, the companies could have created their last safe re-sort.In such an unfriendly situation they should have striven for a widen-ing of the arena.By provoking new issues and stakeholders, they might194 managing the eu arena have won at least more time and at most more benign issues and stakehold-ers.They could have reactivated, for example, the issues of stagnating em-ployment and global competitiveness that need innovative technology.That might have brought to their side the trade unions and the socialist par-ties fearing loss of employment to US producers.Even DG Social Affairsand DG Industry might have joined this coalition actively.The companiescould also have demanded that the precaution principle (if risk, no admis-sion), if adopted, should be applied, as a matter of legal fairness, to totallydifferent policy areas as well, such as to transport, chemicals, regional de-velopment and, not least, traditional agriculture.This might have broughtmany new stakeholders into the arena for fighting against the principle.The companies could even have linked their interests to the Agenda 2000,being decided in March 1999, on which the issues of employment andgrowth stood central.All the foregoing recommendations are hindsight wisdom, useful forlearning and anyhow illustrating the room to manage an unfriendly arena.Since 2002 much has changed.The EP has kept its moderate position, butDG SANCO (David Byrne) came to sit in the driver s seat on the food do-main and took the lines of traceability and labelling.DG AGRI (Franz Fish-ler) wanted controlled experiments with GMO in agriculture rather than afull prohibition.DG RTD and DG ENTER joined the troops actively on re-search and production.To open the EU market to new US GMO crops, theUS government continued its pressure through the WTO and directly onEuropean governments in the Council.In September 2003, the Commis-sion proposed its moderate regulations on GMO food and feed authorisa-tion (EC 2003/1829) and traceability and labelling (EC 2003/ 1830) to theParliament and Council.True enough, its crucial Standing Committee onFood Chain and Animal Health (SCoFCAH, comitology) often votesagainst Commission proposals, based on EFSA expertise, to allow newGMO crops and so enables Parliament and Council to overrule the Com-mission formally but, as always the case so far, neither the EP nor Councilcould produce a majority against these proposals and hence they all let (ac-cording to the rules of comitology) the Commission win and admit newGMOs willy-nilly [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]