getting enough to eat, but also a range of other concerns, such as food safety and nutrition.
In addition, other economic and political issues can occupy the minds of those who typi-
cally show few signs of hunger or malnutrition. The planet supports a burgeoning
human population well over 6 billion, but agriculture can sustainably provide for only
about 3–4 billion of us. For good or for bad, the success of humans at procreation now
demands that we turn increasingly against nature in order to provide enough food to main-
tain the increasingly unnatural human population. As agriculture becomes increasingly
technological, and less and less traditional, many people become increasingly vocal in
expressing concern for safety in food production systems.
Our prior history shows little mass interest in the safety of food production, especially if
there was sufficient safe food to go around. But societies have always suffered from local,
regional, or widespread food famines and adulterations, and these scourges continue today.
With public interest in food and agriculture increasing within affluent societies, newer tech-
nologies are coming under scrutiny as potentially hazardous.
The transition from traditional farming practices and food production systems to the
application of modern technologies in all aspects of agriculture and food in the early twen-
tieth century was accompanied by a mass exodus of farm folk to urban centers. As a result,
unlike a century ago, few urban people in affluent societies have a direct personal or family
connection to farming and consequently have little comprehension of how food is pro-
duced. This unfortunate ignorance leads to gross misconceptions and a rather romantic
aura of “traditional” farming. The anxiety fostered by beliefs that the agricultural technol-
ogy is suspect also leads to demands that government assume a greater role in ensuring the
safety and security of the food supply, even when there is little or no scientific justification
(on the basis of actual harm) for doing so.
A large number of technologies—all of which pose some degree of risk to health or
environment—have been introduced to farming and food production in the last 100
years. Many of these, such as mechanization, farm management (agronomy), and genetic
modification through plant and animal breeding, have had a dramatic and positive impact
on both the quantity and quality of food produced. In addition, technological advances
and applications in food storage, processing, and transport allowed human society to eat,
flourish, and expand well beyond natural limits to the sustainable population and allowed
individuals to enjoy an expected average lifespan nearly double that of our grandparents.
Nevertheless, all technologies do carry risks, and in modern risk-averse society, those
risks must be identified, assessed, and managed. Because of the long history of relatively
“safe” introductions of technology to agriculture and food, most city dwellers paid little
heed to risks associated with adoption of, for example, tractors on the farm, although
many farmers (and family members) suffered death or dismemberment from mechanical
accidents involving the powerful machines, and such accidents continue today. Through
the twentieth century, governmental regulations evolved to ensure the safe application of
almost all technologies and innovations in farming. However, in the 1970s and 1980s,
many people began to question the safety of food production systems and the efficacy of
regulations governing them. Spurring this anxiety, in the absence of any true problems
with the food supply, was the increasing awareness of chemical fertilizers, pesticides,
and the general feeling that farming was becoming “high tech,” and not the way it was
in the old days. One manifestation was a common wariness and subsequent demand to
increase regulation on plant, animal, and microbial breeding, where genes were modified
using recombinant DNA (rDNA) technologies, often calledgenetic engineering(GE)
or genetic modification(GM) to produce genetically engineered/modified organisms
292 REGULATIONS AND BIOSAFETY