Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
products.
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Part I of this chapter reviews this history and explains why
such opposition was subsequently defeated by Brazilian interests that
sought to continue the nation's economic tradition of being a crop-
exporting country, and that sought to capitalize on the growing inter-
national market for food crops.
Other factors also contributed to changes in policy that favor GM
agriculture. For example, in 1998 in Rio Grande do Sul, the southern-
most state of Brazil, farmers concerned about international competitive-
ness started to illegally cultivate transgenic soybean with GM seed smug-
gled from Argentina. The growing and harvest of GM crops in Brazil
was thereby undertaken in violation of national law, and its continua-
tion demonstrated the lack of effectiveness and enforcement of Brazilian
rules restricting GM agriculture.
Part II discusses the dramatic shift of Brazilian policy in favor of GM
crops and reviews some of its promotional features for cultivation of GM
crops. It also comments on the lack of public participation in the process
of policy change. The scenario indicates that governance of international
trade by the World Trade Organization is a major influence on the poli-
cies of developing and exporting nations such as Brazil.
Part III deals with the role of the media and the issue of social repre-
sentation in the policy change process. It outlines a research project and
its results with regard to Brazilian media coverage of GM crop issues
from January 2000 to June 2005, a critical period that involved the devel-
opment and approval of the new Biosafety law of 2005, which favors GM
agriculture and discusses the main issues involved.
The research data explain the policy change according to the Social
Theory framework of Niklas Luhman. According to Luhman, “Com-
munication is coordinated selectivity. It comes about only if ego fixes
his own state on the basis of uttered information.”
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Luhman describes
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TRF1, n. 98.34.00.027681-8/DF, Relator: Ant onio de Sousa Prudente, 10/08/1999,
D.J.U, 11/11/1999, at 14.
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Niklas Luhmann,
Social Systems
(J. Bednarz, Jr. with D. Baecker, Trans.). Stanford:
Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1984), (1995), 154.
