ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Expected Impacts of Biotechnology on Food Safety in Central and Eastern European Countries
Author: Bakucs Zoltan, Imre Fertő
Expected Impacts of Biotechnology on Food Safety in Central and Eastern European Countries Zoltán Bakucs1,* and Imre Fertő2,3 1 Researcher, Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Science Budaorsi ut 45, H-1112 Budapest, Hungary, fax: +3613193136, email: Bakucs@econ.core.hu 2 Senior Research Advisor, Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Science Budaorsi ut 45, H-1112 Budapest, Hungary 3 Professor, Corvinus University of Budapest, Fővám tér 8, 1093 Budapest, Hungary, email: imre.ferto@uni-corvinus.hu * presenting author Abstract Use of biotechnology in agricultural and food production has become one the most controversial issue in the last decade. Recent research has focused on various aspects of the biotechnology including consumers’ acceptance of GM food (see the survey by Lusk et al. 2005), regulatory issues (e.g. Evanson and Santaniello, 2004), adoption of biotechnology (Krishna and Qaim 2007, Buccola and Xia 2004, Barham et al. 2004), welfare impacts (Johnson et al. 2005, Sobolevsky et al. 2005), and trade policy (Anderson and Jackson 2005). Food safety is one of the major concerns relating to the impacts of biotechnology. Food safety is a crucial aspect of human life and therefore it is an issue of prime importance to the EU. While the related literature is focussing almost exclusively on developed and developing countries, research on transition countries is practically non existent. We focus our study on 6 CEE countries: Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Romania using a Key Technology Survey, to analyse the biotechnologies that might have a strong impact upon food quality and health. The paper contributes to this literature in three ways. First, we investigate the likely future impacts of biotechnology on food safety. Second we employ foresight methodology widely applied for industrial technology in recent years, but so far unexplored for the analysis of agricultural and food technology, except Lafourcade and Chapuy (2000), and Direction Gènèrale des Enterprises (2006). Third, contrary to common practice followed in most foresight projects, we apply cross-country comparison instead focusing on just one country. Results suggest that CEE countries are laggards in the development and application of biotechnology. We find that experts evaluate rather positively the effects of biotechnology on various types of hazards. Apparently, large differences can be observed among country experts to assess these impacts.
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