Furthermore, in practice invocation of the precautionaryprinciple focuses attention solely on the possibility of harm, often ignoring information about the dose to which people are exposed, avoiding consideration of benefits of the agent in question and whether safer substitutes are available, and giving greater weight to studies that appear to indicate a hazard, even when these studies may be of poorer quality.
This morning I had the good fortune to chair a small roundtable discussion on applying the precautionaryprinciple in the context of large business projects such as those undertaken by the extractives industries and agriculture.
The precautionaryprinciple states that, if there is uncertainty regarding the effects of exposure to an agent, the burden of proof that exposure does not cause harm falls on those who utilize the agent.
Contamination of what is billed as science-based risk assessment by activist researchers and by the precautionaryprinciple has become a pervasive problem.