Magda Fahsi
Is industrial involvement in science geared only toward profit? Many consumers and citizens in Europe seem to think so, according to Professor Anne Glover, the chief scientific advisor to European Commission President José Manuel Barroso. During a briefing here in Brussels on the relationship between science and political decision-making, she said she has become “extremely uncomfortable” witnessing the lack of trust in some quarters at the role of industry in science.
“Any scientific researcher that has even remotely spoken with the industry becomes suspicious and this is a problem,” Gloves says. There seems to be an increasing lack of public confidence in the reliability of scientific evidence, especially when it comes to areas such as public health and environmental protection. “We need to do something to restore citizen’s confidence in science,” Glover argues.
In 2012, the European Commission made a review of the policies that had been adopted by the EU in certain areas, and examined the links with available scientific evidence. “Whereas in some areas, policies follow closely scientific evidence, in others, they bear no relation whatsoever with science,” Glover explains. This matters, because, she says, “evidence-based policies are more robust and easier to defend.”
Why is it, then, that some policies do not follow scientific evidence? Before making decisions in areas such as food, health and the environment, the European Union typically gathers evidence from different sources, including research institutes, academic circles, businesses and various interest groups. The idea is to take into account as wide as possible a range of different interests and to reach evidence-based conclusions. That process, however, tends to run into a few problems.
First, there are vested interests at stake: The evidence provided by industry, for example, although claimed to be scientific, is very rarely neutral. Even research institutes are accused of having a particular agenda, since they often depend on government or industry for funding. Science has actually been used to defend some specific points of views; this may at least partially explain the erosion of trust in consultations and evidence-gathering processes.
Second, businesses on the whole have many more resources, financial and human, to conduct research and provide the European Commission with well-written and detailed reports. These groups have major lobbying power and, as such, are more likely to influence the decision-making process than, say, consumer protection associations or civil society organizations.
Unhealthy and unsafe products
Glover argues that “it is not in companies’ interests to put bad-quality or unhealthy products on the market, since they will lose sales.” Yet numerous food scandals in Europe in recent years — dioxin in chicken, hormones in beef, pesticides in vegetables, dangerous additives in food, phthalates in toys — show this is, at best, wishful thinking. The food industry has, sometimes knowingly, sold unhealthy or unsafe products. We have to acknowledge that industries aren’t always concerned with consumers’ health or safety.
What they are concerned with is profit. To pretend otherwise is not realistic. What they want is not scientific evidence-based legislation; instead, they want to minimize the administrative burden and any other potential hindrance to their businesses. And public authorities are generally willing to accommodate them, because they know that in the other event, companies would move to other countries, leading to unpopular loss of jobs in the process.
Another issue is that science is not absolute; very often, there is no such thing as one valid truth. Instead, science is full of uncertainties. “Many people only want to use a product or a substance if they are certain it is safe, but you can never prove a product is safe, you can only show where there are potential hazards,” Glove explains. As a consequence, there is always a certain modicum of risk involved. The question is, to what extent do we accept that risk?
“Take a car for example,” intervenes Wolfgang Weber, VP of BASF. “We all know that a car represents a potential hazard since you could kill someone with it. Do we ban cars? No, what we do is manage the risk by adopting a code of conduct for driving … It is the same with other products. We should not ban them outright but learn how to manage the risk.”
Weber goes on, “Yet this is exactly what we have done, for example, with shale gas in Europe: some countries have banned its exploitation even before we were able to assess the potential risks. This is not in line with sound-based legislation.” Weber has conveniently forgotten that some research on shale gas was done in the U.S. and that the results were not necessarily positive. According to Antoine Simon, extraction industries campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, “several peer-reviewed studies have shown that extraction operations and production activities significantly increase the cancer risks for communities living less than half a mile from drilling sites.”
Besides, Weber’s example on cars looks spurious to us. Whereas consumers are responsible for the way they drive their car, which allows them to minimize a known risk, this is not the case with, for example, unhealthy additives in their food or dangerous chemicals in an equipment: in this case, there is not much they can do to manage the risk since they would not know about it in the first place.
Science is not absolute
Additionally, because science is not absolute, you can use it in any sense you want. One fact well-known to scientific researchers is that you generally only find what you are looking for. A recent controversy in France on the benefits and damages of wine consumption may serve to illustrate the point.
A study carried out by the Service for Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Paris-based Institute Gustave-Roussy, published in early March, attributes 49,000 premature deaths per year – or 134 every day – to alcohol-related diseases. The industry declared itself surprised by the findings.
Carole Brigaudeau, director of communications at SpiritsEurope, which represents producers of spirits drinks at the EU level, questioned the quality of the study and the estimates for the alcohol-attributable mortality in France. “We are also surprised by the conclusion that alcohol consumption is detrimental even at very low dose. This appears to be in contradiction with the currently available evidence base,” Brigaudeau said in an interview with the European daily EurActiv.
If science does not agree with science, it may be difficult for consumers and citizens to know which studies they can trust. It is not so much about trusting science than knowing which report, or whom, citizens can trust. In other words, consumers’ problem isn’t with science so much as it is with the way science is often used and abused by politicians and industry.
Take GMOs for example. “The European Food Safety Agency says there is not risk with GMOs. Despite this, many countries in Europe don’t want them,” says Wolfgang Weber. “BASF has been negotiating for years with the European Commission to have some GMO potato approved for cultivation. In the end, we had to relocate to the U.S. because in ten years we have not managed to move forward. If governments don’t want them [GMOs] for political reasons, this is fair enough, but they should not claim that there is a lack of scientific evidence.”
“We live in a democracy,” Glover adds. “Consumers have the right to say that they don’t want GMOs. But then, let’s be transparent about it; and let’s tell them there is no scientific evidence to refuse GMOs.”
Yet Glover herself admits that science cannot “prove” something is safe. How then can she be so sure GMOs do not present any risk? In this case, citizens may just not be prepared to accept the potential risks involved.
Back on the shale gas issue, Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger recently took a favorable position, saying, “I am in favor of producing shale gas, particularly for safety reasons, and to reduce gas prices. In the United States, which is a big producer of shale gas, the price of gas is four times less than in Europe.” In other words, significant falls in gas prices in the U.S. have spurred fear amongst European manufacturers that they will be unable to compete in energy intensive sectors, such as steel-making. Hence the European Commissioner’s declaration.
What the debate over shale gas reveals is the shakiness of the EU’s decision-making process, not because citizens do not trust science per se, but because they do not trust their governments’ rationale. Very often, economic imperatives compete with environmental or public health considerations, and more often than not, public authorities have found themselves taking the side of industry, sometimes in spite of competing scientific evidence. In other words, the hubris of public authorities has undermined the authority of science far more so than the healthy skepticism of the people they purport to represent.