Science, Politics, and the Framing of Modern Agricultural Technologies - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 42

If there are good grounds for arguing that the introduction of MVs did bring about a
“revolution,” through their impacts on the modes of agricultural production, and on
food supplies—and through these effects ultimately on economies and societies in Asia
and Latin America—there is equally no doubt that, so far, there has been no comparable
“gene revolution” in agriculture.
While there are reasons for believing that genetic engineering has the potential for
bringing about even more dramatic changes in agriculture, rural livelihoods, and food
supplies than those associated with the GR, its impacts have been felt, thus far, largely in
North American agriculture, which accounts for the largest share of the current global
acreage under genetically engineered varieties. While this is changing rapidly—develop-
ing countries are expected to exceed rich-country biotech agricultural production before
2015 (James 2010), and Brazil, Argentina, and India are already the principal followers
of the United States—it is genetically modified cotton, grown by millions of small farm-
ers in China and India, that has had the most significant effect upon the poor (though
these effects are controversial; see Glover 2010 and Stone 2012 for an analysis of the dif-
ficulties that arise in resolving this problem). A “gene revolution” to compare with the
“Green Revolution” hasn't yet come about because of the well-organized opposition to
genetically engineered staple food crops, both in rich countries and in the major emerg-
ing economies—including, significantly, both democratic India and authoritarian China.
Part of the reason for this, in some cases, is that popular opposition in rich countries
makes governments in emerging economies nervous about their exports. The technol-
ogy has been successfully framed in a negative way by critics, and this has caused politi-
cians in many countries—often against what their farmers evidently want—to restrict its
development. This negative framing has drawn in part on the earlier, though politically
much less successful, critique of the Green Revolution. This chapter is about the ways in
which these important agricultural technologies have been framed, and it offers an evalu-
ation of evidence and arguments on both sides of the controversies surrounding them.
The Grounds for Critique: Concerns
about “Nature” and about Capitalist
“Imperialism”
In large measure, the critical opposition that the Green Revolution (GR) attracted—
unsuccessful though it was in stopping that transformation of agriculture in many parts
of the “developing” world—has spilled over directly into a much more successful cam-
paign of resistance to the gene revolution, outside North America and some countries
in South America (Herring 2010). Criticism of the GR brought together unlikely allies,
including environmental populists who are critics of conventional science, and some
from the political Left who have often been staunch advocates of the application of sci-
ence and technology to social problems. The former attacked the technology on which
the GR was based, because they saw it as depending on the “conquest of nature” rather