The European Union, chided by scientists for wacky science like declaring that cell phones cause cancer, water does not alleviate thirst and you can go to jail if you don't predict an earthquake, is starting to inch back toward science.
By loosening the noose they have had around agriculture.
Ironically, this is right after environmentalists got Dr. Anne Glover, the first Chief Scientific Adviser to the President of the European Commission, fired over her advocacy of science-based agriculture.
Why the change? It wasn't science, it was economics. Europeans have been loudly criticized for their hypocrisy when it comes to agriculture - yet Europeans can ignore criticism as well as anyone in China or America. The criticism is because 85 percent of the entire world's agricultural subsidies are by Europe for European farmers, and they do that to be able to export everywhere at competitive prices. In less land-wealthy climates, products don't grow as easily so those farmers need science help - and Europe prevents developing nations from competing in the European marketplace and getting some economic equality with an arbitrary definition of a genetically modified food.
The US and the EU would like to negotiate a free-trade deal but that isn't really possible when the EU bans products that might contain their legal definition of GMOs while producing their own genetically modified foods using mutagenesis - which are more dangerous than modern GMOs and yet exempted from their carefully legal definition of a GMO. They are even considered organic.
Ending the 'ban' on GMOs is more legalese, they have not suddenly accepted biology. Individual countries can still ban GMOs and environmental lobbyists made sure it is easier than ever to do so - France, Germany and others
can just claim "protection of a particular ecosystem" or risk of "GM contamination for conventional farmers" and products will stay banned.
But at least if individual countries ban modern genetically modified foods it does not look like an EU war on science, they can just say "France is France."
And Greenpeace and others in the business of scaring people about science have to be happy - now they can lobby member states for bans. Organic food is already a $105 billion industry and getting its competitors banned in countries will be good public relations in places like America, where the elites who embrace anti-science thinking love the idea of being more like Europe.
