GMFuturos Policy Brief 13 June 2013 A New Approach to Governing GM Crops? Key recommendations for policy Good governance of GM should: • Take into account public values and concerns and not be viewed solely as an issue of risk and biosafety. • Recognise that a plant and its genome cannot be separated from the agricultural practices of farming communities not least because food is central to people’s identity and culture. • Be tailored to speciic social and cultural values and needs within individual countries. • Appreciate and engage with the concerns of farmers, consumers and other stakeholders potentially impacted by GM technologies. Global lessons for the UK and EU Unless we examine why GM crops have not been universally ac- cepted as a public good, we will fail to understand the conditions under which ‘GM crops can help to feed the world’. The rise of genetically modiied (GM) crops has been dramatic, but their uptake has not been the smooth nor universal transition predicted by its advocates. Controversy is present even in countries, such as the US, where approvals have been impressively rapid. All too commonly the regulation of GM crops has been challenged as inadequate, even biased. While public and regulatory debates about GM crops have been grid-locked in many parts of the world including the UK and EU, there are lessons to be learned from the global ‘rising powers’ who have experienced similar chal- lenges in governing GM, within their own cultural contexts. This research, undertaken by Durham University, in partnership with local research teams in Mexico, Brazil and India, and funded by The John Templeton Foundation under the banner ‘Can GM crops help to feed the world?’, reveals a diverse variety of factors that inluence decisions surrounding the adoption of GM technologies, many of them cross-cultural and of global signiicance. 1 Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience, Durham University 2014 IHRR Contact: Prof Phil Macnaghten p.m.macnaghten @durham.ac.uk Insitute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience