Science, Politics, and the Framing of Modern Agricultural Technologies - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 44

likely—benefits from the cultivation of genetically engineered food crops (see Nuffield
Council on Bioethics 1999). Of course, we cannot be certain, they argue, that there will
be no harmful effects in the future from the cultivation and the consumption of GMOs,
even if the record so far—from the experience of the United States, where it is thought
that 70 percent of all foods sold commercially have GMO content (Paarlberg 2010, 166)—
seems positive. No amount of science can finally prove that there can never be harmful
effects, for the environment or for the health of humans and of animals. This is to set the
precautionary bar too high—at a height that would have prevented the development of air
travel, for instance, or of cell phone technology. Therefore, the protagonists say, we must
weigh this definite uncertainty against the known and measurable risks—to the environ-
ment, to health, and to the sustainability of livelihoods—of continuing cultivation on
existing lines, and the definable benefits from genetically engineered cultivars.
We do not set out in this chapter to resolve the controversies over the GR and the gene
revolution. That would be to invite hubris. But we do aim to explain the arguments on
both sides, and the prior assumptions, value positions, and politics that frame them.
We begin with an account of the characteristics of the technologies, before going on to
explain the controversies over the Green Revolution and then over “GM.” Though much
of the criticism of the Green Revolution from the 1970s and 1980s has been fairly com-
prehensively refuted, elements of it remain influential, as they are amongst advocates
of food sovereignty, who want to resist what they see as the strengthening of corporate
control of agriculture. There are significant continuities with criticism of GM—shown
in the open letter addressed to M. Diouf. As we have pointed out there is no “gene revo-
lution,” as yet, to compare with the Green Revolution, and we can trace its politics only
tentatively. We do this through an examination of recent controversies over GM food
crops in the two most important “emerging economies”—India and China.
The Technologies
The modern varieties (MVs), especially of wheat and rice, on which the GR was based,
were the products of conventional plant breeding, the science—involving seed selection
and selective breeding—that is essentially a refinement of the practical experimentation
of farmers over millennia, and on which all agriculture has depended from its origins.
The MVs were capable of much higher yields, if grown with adequate supplies of water
and fertilizer. They were bred to be fertilizer-responsive, and the breeders succeeded in
introducing a “dwarfing gene” that gave the plants much shorter and stiffer stalks (they
were sometimes called “dwarf varieties”), so that more energy was put into producing
grain. Some MVs reached maturity more quickly, making for increased cropping inten-
sity. In practice some varieties, such as the IR20 variety of rice (“IR” refers to the fact that
it had been bred at the International Rice Research Institute [IRRI] in the Philippines,
which had been founded with Rockefeller support in 1962), turned out to be rela-
tively tolerant of drought, and to produce comparatively good yields even in relatively