Science, Politics, and the Framing of Modern Agricultural Technologies - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 51

and the first splicing of genes from one organism into another by American scientists
in 1973, venture capital began to move into biotechnology. In America, the US Supreme
Court decided in the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980) that “GMOs” were legally
patentable, meaning that they are the subject of intellectual property rights and, thus,
that profits from them can be protected (at least in the US—patents are national). By
1983, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the United States had approved the
first genetically engineered product for commercialization, human insulin; in the same
year, Monsanto created the first genetically modified plant.
Second, Schurman and Munro (2010) show that this new domination of pri-
vate players in scientific research didn't “just happen.” The American government
actively facilitated it through private research tax credits and regulatory cutbacks.
In the international arena, foreign policy pushed developing countries to liberal-
ize their agricultural markets. Finally, the new “knowledge economy” demanded
internationally recognized international property rights (IPRs) in order that
R&D investments in a global economy be protected. The 1994 Agreement on
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) protected all tech-
nological products or processes that are new, involve an inventive step, and have an
industrial application. These steps led to concentration of the seed industry globally
into the hands of a few multinational corporations, with one prevailing leader: “If
there was one company whose name became virtually synonymous around the
world with the term GMO, that firm was unquestionably Monsanto” (Schurman
and Munro 2010,18).
Third, in this same period, new transnational social movements sprang up in reac-
tion to the new proficiencies of humanity to destroy itself—through nuclear power
and weapons, chemical weapons, toxic waste, deforestation, and climate change. Two
leading international environmental NGOs—Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth
(FoE)—born in the mid-1970s, later became major anti-GMO forces. Chemical com-
panies, including Monsanto, felt the backlash of the burgeoning environmental move-
ment. Costs increased due to heightened regulation and new lawsuits. In this context
the decision to make a transition from chemical production to agri-biotechnology was
seen—ironically it seems, with hindsight—as exceptionally “green” (and see Shome, this
volume). Scientists saw gene transfer as inherently “safe” when compared to conven-
tional breeding methods:
The act of splicing to generate a transgenic organism is a modest step when com-
pared to the genomic changes induced by all the “crosses” and breeding events used
in agriculture and husbandry. The molecular biology tools simply add a new preci-
sion, speed and reach to this indispensable process of species domestication.
(European Commission 2010, 20)
As the European Commission went on to argue, however, in spite of these views on
the part of many scientists, “public opinion did not 'buy into' this line of thought. . . . The
fact that humans can “engineer” a gene from a species of one kingdom to produce a
species of another has fuelled imaginations and frightened the public” (European