When genetically engineered seeds were first deployed in the Americas in the mid-1990s, the biotechnology industry and its partners envisaged a world in which their crops would be widely accepted as the food of the future. Critics, however, raised a variety of social, environmental, economic, and health concerns. This book traces the emergence of the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety - and the discourse of precaution toward GEOs that the protocol institutionalized internationally. Peter Andree explains this reversal in the and "common-sense and " understanding of genetic engineering, and discusses the new debates it has engendered.