How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 12

agriculture, and development in the early 2000s, global critics considered the juxtaposi-
tion ludicrous: by its very nature, biotechnology could be neither pro-poor nor environ-
mentally friendly (Herring 2007a; Herring 2007c; Scoones 2002).
Genetic engineering thus teeters politically between framing as a powerful new
instrument in the “toolkit” for responding to agricultural and nutritional challenges, on
the one hand, to an eminent and unnecessary threat, on the other (McHughen 2000).
The GMO was born. Mobilization of resistance to genetic engineering in agriculture
turned state promotion of biotechnology in Europe into a moratorium on GMOs in the
late 1990s (Tait 2001; Tiberghien 2007). Global mobilization produced the Cartagena
Protocol on Biosafety under the framework Convention on Biological Diversity (CDB).
This global soft law became important in the national regulation of “living modified
organisms” in trade; in train, “bio-safety” regimes came to consume resources in both
rich and poor nations, but they resolved few conflicts. Instead, new political conflicts
arose over authoritative knowledge. Whose expertise counts? How is civil society repre-
sented in councils dominated by scientists? Are corporate-generated data trustworthy?
How long is long enough to see if allergenicity results from novel proteins that North
Americans consume readily but Europeans and Japanese shun? To borrow Donald
Rumsfeld's awkward phraseology, does the absence of evidence of hazard constitute evi-
dence of absence?
The United States and the European Union (EU) structured food markets after the
Gene Revolution in different ways: either transgenic plants produce foods that are
backed by science demonstrating “substantial equivalence”—and thus absence of
additional risk—or evidence of safety is insufficient under logics of the “precautionary
principle” to allow planting or consumption of the same plants. From the EU politi-
cal position endorsing the precautionary principle, global segregation of food tradables
followed logically, along with “traceability” requirements literally “from farm to fork,”
accompanied by labeling and separate regulatory treatment.25 EU science is the same
as American science, but the regulatory outcomes represent varying political organiza-
tion and intensity of preferences among mobilized groups. The implications for friction
in food trade and the ability of farmers to deal with the paperwork are daunting, but a
hard interpretation of the precautionary principle mandated a whole new world of sur-
veillance and control of farms, plants, and farmers based on how they produce food—
a global proto-state restructuring markets. Like many “high-modernist” projects, one
would predict that the Panopticon would not do well seeing into rural society (Scott
1998).
On the ground, in farming communities, diffusion of state regulation ironically con-
tributed to diffusion of the technology itself; material interests proved stronger than dis-
tal edicts. Tight regulation by states and high prices of seeds from multinational firms
drove farmers to illicit acquisition of transgenics—much like the illicit spread of phar-
maceuticals, music, and software. Seeds followed a pattern indicated in the title of Moises
Naim's (2005) treatment of the underground international economy: Illicit . here are
few seed police in the villages or at international borders; “seeing like a state” encoun-
ters familiar limitations and ellipses. A global phenomenon of underground diffusion