How Is Food Political? Market, State, and Knowledge - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 31

44. On transgenics and environmental risk specifically, Thies and Devare 2007. See also
National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences (2002).
45. After the work of the economist Frank Knight (1921). On the pervasiveness of risk in mod-
ern thought, and political consequences, see Giddens (1999).
46. For centering property in biotechnology on the seed, and the connection to multinational
capital, see Charles 2001; Kloppenburg 2004; Kloppenburg and Kleinman 1987; Shiva
1997. For a contrary view on poverty effects, see Lipton 2007. Public-sector alternatives are
discussed in Cohen (2005).
47. On framing of the “terminator,” Gold (2003). The technology may not work and
has not been deployed in any crop anywhere in the world, but it has succeeded as a
social-movement target, generating a global campaign (Herring 2006).
48. The authoritative source on these questions is Clive James (Annual), though diffusion
of biotechnology is understated in the aggregate data since illegal distribution of seeds
underground is not counted, indeed cannot be counted. The questions in the text have
been prominent in disputes around Bt cotton in India, where suicides have been attributed
transgenic seeds. Though not a food crop, the distributive issues in the text are the same.
See Herring (2007a) and Herring (2013) for a summary of issues and empirics.
49. For a moderating view, see Graff, Hochman, and Zilberman in this volume. They set out
the political economy of regulation literature and explain why Europe has different inter-
ests in transgenics from those of the United States. On European regulatory contradic-
tions and politics, see Wesseler and Kalaitzandonakes (2011).
50. John Dryzek (2005) deploys the concept of “environmental discourses” to explain the ele-
ments that cohere in different worldviews relevant to diagnosing and addressing prob-
lems. On the more general question of interplay of ideas and interests in political ecology,
see Robbins (2004).
51. On framing effects, Benford and Snow 2000. Koopmans and Olzak (2004) discuss discur-
sive opportunities that effect politics. On ethics as a source of interest that leads to action,
see chapters by Clough, this volume, and Johnston and MacKendrick. On interests in bio-
fortification, see Stein, this volume. Though the line dividing “organic” and “genetically
modified” is ideational, very real interests are engaged for farmers, given market structur-
ing effects of the organic premium. See the essay by Thies in this volume.
52. Few issues are more discussed with less resolution. For two different demonstrations
that the methodological individualism approach needs reformation, consider Robert
Wade's Village Republics , in which geophysical attributes of villages matter fundamen-
tally, and Elizabeth Wood's Insurgent Collective Action, which makes a claim for moral
outrage driving militant organization in peasant society, contrary to rational calculation
of interests.
53. Oreskes and Conway (2010) in their topic Merchants of Doubt demonstrate how a handful
of scientists instrumentally unsettled the established science on linkages of tobacco smoke
to cancer and carbon fuel emissions to global warming at the behest of corporate clients
who stood to lose if the mainstream science became the basis of law and regulation.
54. Because science is widely contested by social networks opposed to genetic engineer-
ing as being American or corporate or both, and thus biased, it is useful to look to the
meta-analysis of the European Union's Directorate-General for Research (2010) of decades
of EU-funded studies; their conclusions confirm the global consensus in the text. A more
recent meta-analysis of the last decade of global literature by Italian scientists confirms the
EU findings (Nicolia, Manzo, Veronesi, and Rosellini 2013).