Science, Politics, and the Framing of Modern Agricultural Technologies - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 45

unfavorable conditions. Varieties like this then came to be cultivated very extensively
over large areas, giving rise, reasonably enough, to fears of the implications of mono-
cropping, particularly because of the possibility of large scale pest and disease infesta-
tion. Indeed, cultivators of MVs very often found themselves on a “pesticide treadmill,”
having to invest more and more in plant-protection chemicals that proved to be less and
less effective. At the same time, the moisture demands of MVs, particularly when they
brought more intensive cultivation, could mean excessive use of water, and especially
of groundwater. The varieties encouraged mechanized pumping of groundwater, and
sometimes (though not invariably) this depended on government policiesthe mechani-
zation of land preparation, harvesting, and threshing, whether or not this brought agro-
nomic advantages (see, for example, Binswanger 1978).
MVs are actually GMOs, given that they involve genetic modification (such as the
incorporation of the dwarfing genes), but they have not been genetically “engineered.” In
genetic engineering, desirable genes (and their inherent characteristics) are transferred, in
a laboratory, between organisms (and usually across species) so as to create desirable traits
that it would otherwise be impossible to bring about through conventional breeding. It
may sound, to those who aren't scientists, to be a difficult process, but in fact such genetic
engineering is regularly carried on by ordinary college students of biology. It is not, after
all, so very “hi-tech”—and this is why, contrary to the arguments of anti-GMO campaign-
ers, it has been possible for a veritable cottage industry to arise in parts of India, China, and
Brazil, for the production of transgenics, often incorporating genetic material “pirated”
from big corporations (very much like “pirated” film and music CDs, see Herring 2007b).
An important example of genetic engineering is that of the insertion of the gene
Cry1Ac from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) into plants to provide them
with insecticidal qualities—the resulting Bt protein, when ingested by certain pests,
causes the insects to die. This particular process has been widely approved with cotton
and maize (used for fiber and feed respectively—though Bt enters the food chain from
both sources), but it has, so far, been highly contested for use in food staples such as rice
(as we discuss later, with particular reference to China). The labeling “GMOs,” or just
of “GM” in regard to the technology, which has acquired a powerful negative valence
(Herring 2010), is used to refer to the products of genetic engineering—though this pro-
cess is more accurately referred to as recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology, and the
cultivars produced by it are better described as “transgenics” (Herring 2007a). These
cultivars include both hybrids and open pollinated varieties. The distinction is impor-
tant (see Swaminathan 2011). Hybrid plants, whether conventional ones or transgenics,
typically yield 10-20 percent more than their parent plants, but they do not breed true if
they are grown again. New seeds (the product of cross-pollination by hand—for the case
of cotton, see Ramamurthy 2010) have to be purchased every season. In the case of open
pollinated varieties—even if they are transgenics—seeds can be kept by farmers.
The transgenics (as we will now usually describe them) that have been widely cultivated
hitherto—developed mainly, it is true, by a small number of US-based corporations, which
have of course been interested primarily in profits and not in the welfare of poor people—
have been engineered to incorporate two traits in particular, those of herbicide tolerance