Book Review : When Cooperation Fails: The International Law and Politics of Genetically Modified Foods by Mark A. Pollack & Gregory C. Shaffer

Mark Pollack and Gregory Shaffer’s book (“When Cooperation Fails: The International Law and Politics of Genetically Modified Foods”) offers comprehensive and multi-dimensional perspectives on the international, in particular transatlantic, regulation of GM foods. The über-narrative of this book is “governance” regarding the fundamental question of how (or whether) to regulate GM foods in transatlantic relations. The book captures the “failure of cooperation” or failed governance between two titans, the US and the EU. After a panoramic description on the history and recent developments of the transatlantic engagement on GM foods issues, they present conditions and constraints which deter productive interaction (cooperation) between them. However, the book largely leaves unattended the root cause of tension in this particular dispute: the inherently uncertain and provisional nature of “science” which the regulation of GM foods inevitably involves. It is important to note that the inherently uncertain and provisional nature of risk science around GM foods itself institutes a deep structure beneath all these diverging phenomena