Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Both sides in the global rift over biotechnology contest “the Science.” Though there
are certainly controversies in science (Agin 2006; Waltz 2009), what has been politically
potent is the concept of “risk.” Science makes no pretense to address risk preferences.
Risk in a strict scientific sense means probability of exposure to some hazard, usually
expressed as hazard X exposure  =  risk .44 Risk thus assumes a known probability dis-
tribution of some hazard—air travel and surgery are common examples of known risk
distributions. This deceptively simple formulation is often irrelevant, however, because
neither hazard nor probability is known, or cannot be measured. This condition is called
“Knightian uncertainty.”45 This characterization obtains in regard to foods and plants
produced with genetic engineering.
In a world of uncertainty , risk is of necessity a social construction. In everyday life,
we think in terms of acceptable risk; some risks are taken even in the face of obvious
hazard because the risk of doing nothing is higher—surgery, for example—or because of
expected benefits—air travel, for example. Ideally, regulation of any technology would
reach some threshold of acceptable risk—balanced with benefits—for a whole society.
However, as Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) demonstrate in Risk and Culture , politics
around risk are not influenced by the data alone, even when there are data. Given the
plurality of values and knowledge in societies, consensus on how to weight caution, risk,
and benefits will be difficult to attain. Resultant politics will prove contentious if much
is at stake; different framings of the GMO debate refract different weightings of what
is at stake. Consensual democratic procedures for weighting preferences prove elusive,
and intensity of preference looms large. In assessing GMOs, globally, the “precaution-
ary principle” is often evoked to justify opposition, but it is clearly difficult to know how
much precaution is cautious enough (DeFrancesco 2013).
How is it to be distributed? Distributive questions are folded into biotechnology itself
by arguments that the industry poses special threats to small farmers and poor nations.
In this view, small farmers will be crushed by multinational control of seed property
rights: “bio-feudalism” or “bio-serfdom.”46 The hoax of a “terminator gene” in geneti-
cally engineered crops generated a global movement to “Ban the Terminator”; the idea
of sterile seeds proved remarkably persistent in politics despite widespread under-
ground breeding of transgenic plants by farmers.47 Thus an argument that how geneti-
cally engineered crops are produced raised questions of social justice: How will fruits of
production be distributed? This critique based on inevitable corporate dominance has
been persistent and powerful, though there are other sources of research and develop-
ment (Cohen 2005). Public-sector crops such as Golden Rice or the ring-spot virus-
resistant papaya come without property claims attached to the technology when used
by small farmers (Evanega and Lynas, this volume). Stealth seeds that move in under-
ground markets are likewise outside the orbit of exactions of property claims of firms
(Herring and Kandlikar 2009). The difficult empirical questions are seldom significant
in the heated political debates over income distribution: in which countries are there
patents on plants? If there are patents, are they enforced? If enforced, is the marginal
return on the technology fee larger than the marginal cost? How large a percentage of
variable costs of production are seeds? The rapid diffusion of genetically engineered
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