The Political Economy of Regulation of Biotechnology in Agriculture - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 688

India, she said, “bullshit” is an important cooking fuel source, gathered by women
and shaped into pats, with each woman's handprint duly pressed into the pat and left
to dry—quite an honor. Although a wide range social issues were highlighted in the
documentary, our audience homed in on the issue of GM crops to begin the discus-
sion period.
The first question from the audience was about gene flow,3 3 specifically, about the
presence of transgenes4 that had been detected in maize landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico,
by Quist and Chapela (2001), an occurrence the questioner referred to as “genetic
pollution.” As the “science” half of the team, I took the question. I began to describe
recent work undertaken by Ortiz et al. (2005) in which they were unable to substan-
tiate the findings of Quist and Chapela (2001). Before I could elaborate any further,
I was suddenly being called a “handmaiden of the industry.” Ron and I were called
“criminals” and a woman from the audience stood up and said she was “ashamed to be
on the same faculty” with us and stormed out. I sat there stunned. What had just hap-
pened and why?
I had observed this level of animosity toward Cornell researchers once before. Oddly,
in the same venue after the screening of Deborah Kerns Garcia's film, The Future of Food
(2004), a film critical of both transgenic technology and the biotechnology industry.
The film was followed by a panel discussion during which Garcia, Ignacio Chapela, and
a few of the Cornell faculty fielded questions from the audience, which packed the the-
ater. Here, too, Cornell researchers were accused of being in bed with the biotech indus-
try, Monsanto Corporation and its ilk. Transgenic crops, said members of the audience,
were destroying soil ecology, contaminating the food supply, and, along with the bio-
tech industry, conducting a massive experiment on the American people. This was more
than just a “town-gown” conflict.
As a scientist, I thought I was used to controversy. We debate among ourselves con-
stantly, but these arguments focus on aspects of the science. Personal accusations are
not typically a part of these debates. But, here, in these public venues, there was no
such decorum. It was shocking to me and difficult to engage with; robust research
data were not welcome here. My colleague, Ron Herring, was like a duck in water, let-
ting it all shed right of of him. “Oh, this happens all the time,” he said, “it's political.”
No wonder scientists don't enjoy engaging in these discussions, I thought, these are
personal attacks that normally do not belong in scientific discourse. It was then that
I realized this had nothing to do with scientific discourse; instead, this was politicized
social discourse on a highly contentious technology. How had such an enormous rift
developed between those who choose to use GM (genetically modified) technologies
and those who passionately oppose their use? This rift has its roots in the shift from an
agrarian-based rural development model of agriculture to the agri-industrial paradigm
(Levidow and Boschert, 2008), where policy has—in the main—supported a consump-
tive, technology-driven approach to food production, favoring factory farming and its
associated economies of scale, and one that has marginalized those choosing alternative
agricultural approaches.