How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 18

Much of the food fight over biotechnology is indeed about technology: how is it pro-
duced? Who should decide what technologies are acceptable? The knowledge compo-
nent is critical—what authoritative knowledge could establish the safety claimed by
government agencies and scientific establishments for genetically engineered plants?
But much more was at stake, since uncertainty is characteristic of many modern tech-
nologies—the common mobile phone among them. How uncertainty is constructed is
itself an ideational question—where does acceptable uncertainty become unacceptable
risk? Science is evoked and attacked as providing evidence for safety in use of GMOs;
rival global networks have their own epistemologies, media and reference works. This
is a puzzling outcome: genetic engineering is widely accepted in other life-and-death
fields, such as pharmaceuticals, where risk is measured against benefit. Biotechnology
in food became a lightening rod because food politics is suffused with questions of eth-
ics, justice, and identity, with supporting visions of culturally validated livelihoods,
landscapes, and techniques.39 In mobilization framings, heirloom varieties confront
Franken-Foods; organic confronts industrial; the global periphery confronts the core.
What is to be produced? Unlike dioxin or plutonium, the GMO does not exist
unless one knows how it was produced. Regulatory provisions, politics, and the object
itself define a what that is completely dependent on how it is produced.40 Though it
is difficult to find evidence of any consequential differences between plant breeding
that is molecular and other ways of getting traits into plants, the GMO as an object
of governmentality is widely subject to mobilization, special regulation, surveillance,
and control.41 The how of production evokes antithetical evocation of the natural that
is normatively sanctioned. Criteria for the line between “natural” and “unnatural”
are neither obvious nor consensual. For some, molecular plant breeding involves an
unnatural act. Prince Charles famously proclaimed: “This kind of genetic engineer-
ing takes mankind into realms that belong to God, and to God alone. . . .” Not only is
biotechnology here framed as crossing that nebulous line between the natural and
the unnatural, but Prince Charles went on to endorse Vandana Shiva's claim that bio-
tech seeds were responsible for mass suicides of farmers in India—“genocidal” in her
words.42
The “GMO” had to be invented as an idea. It was created by framing—lumping and
splitting of recombinant DNA techniques across uses, segregating food from other
applications, such as pharmaceuticals; there are no Franken-Pills on posters. This
framing was the work of intellectual activists in networks building on concerns first
expressed by molecular biologists.43 Material consequences of this ideational move
were profound. Labels for organic products typically preclude molecular breeding of
seeds, no matter what cultivation techniques are followed. There are spatial differen-
tiations with legal standing—GMO-free zones and GMO-free countries. Markets are
affected by trade restrictions, trade disputes, and a market premium niche for GMO-free
food. The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety deals only with international surveillance
of genetically engineered plants. Labeling campaigns premised on a special status for
GMO-food proliferate even in the United States, long considered the most biotechnol-
ogy friendly of polities.