Ethical acceptability, health policy and foods biotechnology based foods: is there a third way between the precaution principle and an overly enthusiastic dissemination of GMO?

The demand for consumer safety with regard to the food-processing industry is becoming, legitimately, more and more urgent. If ingested drugs can carry deleterious effects that exceed the beneficial effect that the research was initially undertaken for, then the same can only be the case for foods that stem from the same new biotechnologies, zero risk being non existent. There are two conflicting viewpoints about the possible risks linked to genetically modified organisms: a posteriori protection (based on vigilance once the product is on the market) and an a priori protection (at present usually supported by the precaution principle). We suggest a third way, which ensures consumer safety, but doesn't hinder scientific progress. Just as there are regulations for the protection of human subjects in biomedical research and regulations for the use of drugs after they are marketed, so should such regulations be introduced in the domains of food production that use biotechnologies. We therefore suggest that the scientific community and the food-processing industry develop evaluation protocols for new foods like the ones that exist for drugs. We thus offer thirteen regulations, based on the Helsinki declaration, in order to establish these protocols. These proposals, applied to food-processing research, would enable the industry to return confidence to consumers and thus avoid the random blocking of scientific progress, which is a source of health for the greater population.