Kept out of Africa, Paarlberg asserted that problems of chronic hunger and
undernutrition in Africa could and should be solved by cultivating and consuming
GM crops (Paarlberg, 2009). His analysis mistakenly assumed that people starve in
Africa because too little food is produced, rather than because they are poor. If
chronic hunger was merely a technical problem to which technology could
provide a solution, it would have been solved long ago. It persists because it is a
socioeconomic problem, not a technological one. An irony that Paarlberg and his
allies fail to address is that under conditions of severe socioeconomic inequalities,
introducing certain kinds of technological innovations can aggravate rather than
diminish the underlying problems (Griffin, 1974).
Spurious uncertainties and imprecision
Just as uncertainties can be opportunistically concealed or understated, they can
also be exaggerated. The range of issues, to which the tactic of exaggerating the
magnitude and significance of uncertainties has been applied, is almost as broad
as the range of examples of spurious certainty. One tactic has involved exploiting
the ambiguity as between ‘there is no proof of harm’ and ‘there is no evidence of
harm’. Evidence is often not conclusive, from which it certainly does not follow
that no relevant evidence is available. Policy judgements are invariably informed
by assump tions about how much, of which kinds of evidence may be deemed
variously necessary or sufficient to sustain decisions to permit, forbid or restrict
some products of practices, even though such assumptions often remained implicit.
In the USA, from the 1960s until the late 1970s, for example, the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occu -
pational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) regularly deemed a compound
carcinogenic on the basis of evidence from one variety of one species of laboratory
animals. Following the installation of the Reagan administration, the threshold
criterion was first increased to evidence from two different species, and then to
two different animals species administered the test compound by relevant routes
of exposure plus in vitro mutagenicity data (Proctor, 1995). Those changes repre -
sented political shifts in the criteria that data sets had to meet before US government
agencies were allowed to categorize a compound as carcinogenic. It was not the
science that changed, but the evaluative benchmarks against which the policy-makers
wanted the scientific evidence to be interpreted. In those processes, scientific findings
that were previously deemed reliable and sufficient were subsequently reinterpreted
as insufficient (Davis, 2007).
The debate in which the greatest efforts have been made to exaggerate the
magnitude and significance of scientific uncertainties has been in respect of climate
change and the impact of human industrial activities on global climate and local
weather. In this case, as indicated previously, there are serious uncertainties,
especially when it comes to forecasting future developments, but that is no justifi -
cation for exaggerating the uncertainties. To combat such exaggerations, a report
was issued jointly by the US National Academy of Sciences (US NAS) and the
50 Erik Millstone
undernutrition in Africa could and should be solved by cultivating and consuming
GM crops (Paarlberg, 2009). His analysis mistakenly assumed that people starve in
Africa because too little food is produced, rather than because they are poor. If
chronic hunger was merely a technical problem to which technology could
provide a solution, it would have been solved long ago. It persists because it is a
socioeconomic problem, not a technological one. An irony that Paarlberg and his
allies fail to address is that under conditions of severe socioeconomic inequalities,
introducing certain kinds of technological innovations can aggravate rather than
diminish the underlying problems (Griffin, 1974).
Spurious uncertainties and imprecision
Just as uncertainties can be opportunistically concealed or understated, they can
also be exaggerated. The range of issues, to which the tactic of exaggerating the
magnitude and significance of uncertainties has been applied, is almost as broad
as the range of examples of spurious certainty. One tactic has involved exploiting
the ambiguity as between ‘there is no proof of harm’ and ‘there is no evidence of
harm’. Evidence is often not conclusive, from which it certainly does not follow
that no relevant evidence is available. Policy judgements are invariably informed
by assump tions about how much, of which kinds of evidence may be deemed
variously necessary or sufficient to sustain decisions to permit, forbid or restrict
some products of practices, even though such assumptions often remained implicit.
In the USA, from the 1960s until the late 1970s, for example, the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occu -
pational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) regularly deemed a compound
carcinogenic on the basis of evidence from one variety of one species of laboratory
animals. Following the installation of the Reagan administration, the threshold
criterion was first increased to evidence from two different species, and then to
two different animals species administered the test compound by relevant routes
of exposure plus in vitro mutagenicity data (Proctor, 1995). Those changes repre -
sented political shifts in the criteria that data sets had to meet before US government
agencies were allowed to categorize a compound as carcinogenic. It was not the
science that changed, but the evaluative benchmarks against which the policy-makers
wanted the scientific evidence to be interpreted. In those processes, scientific findings
that were previously deemed reliable and sufficient were subsequently reinterpreted
as insufficient (Davis, 2007).
The debate in which the greatest efforts have been made to exaggerate the
magnitude and significance of scientific uncertainties has been in respect of climate
change and the impact of human industrial activities on global climate and local
weather. In this case, as indicated previously, there are serious uncertainties,
especially when it comes to forecasting future developments, but that is no justifi -
cation for exaggerating the uncertainties. To combat such exaggerations, a report
was issued jointly by the US National Academy of Sciences (US NAS) and the
50 Erik Millstone