GMO risks, food security, climate change and the entrenchment of neo-liberal legal narratives

This article explores the artificial nature of the neo-liberal legal narratives on GMOs, complementing Anne Saab’s analysis of the Public International Law (‘PIL’) climate change adaptation regime with a deconstruction of the hegemonic transnational legal discourse on the risks, costs and benefits of agricultural biotechnologies. The enquiry into the dominant regulatory approach to the governance of GMO risks sheds light on its specific political and socio-economic implications, lending support to the argument that GMOs are identified as a strategy to tackle food insecurity and facilitate climate change adaptation simply because their development, patenting and trade serve the profit-making goals of transnational market actors. Against this backdrop, the PIL discourse on climate resilient GMOs and the hegemonic transnational legal narrative on GMO safety and food security turn out to be two sides of the same coin.