The Political Economy of Regulation of Biotechnology in Agriculture - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 689

Farming Systems
Farming is a way of life. Those working the land vary in their relationship to it and in
the means they choose to manage it. Farmers (land managers) make daily decisions on
what inputs they will use on their farmland, decisions based strongly on their world-
view or “lifeworld” (Shurman and Munro 2010). Organic farmers rely on inputs largely
derived from the environment, e.g., manures, crop residues, and composts, to main-
tain soil fertility and “natural”5 products and processes for pest control. Conventional
farmers invest in synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and other industrial technologies to
ensure crop nutrition and to control pests for high yields. While no single model of con-
ventional farm management prevails, this term refers to farms that tend to embrace the
agri-industrial paradigm of production. These practices involve the broad-scale use of
products emerging from the chemical industry.
The bulk of farmland in industrialized nations is managed conventionally. The total
US farmland under crop production in 2008 was 844 million acres; of this, only 0.57%
(4.8 million acres) was certified organic. Total US acreage for livestock and pasture land
was 473 million acres, with certified organic farms representing 0.46%.6
The advent of transgenic crops has created a new designation, that of GM agriculture ,
which has provoked a whole new set of contentions. Transgenic crops are those that have
been developed using gene splicing technology, also known as genetic engineering. Here,
the DNA comprising a gene of interest is taken from the genome of one organism, or syn-
thesized in the laboratory, and introduced into the genome of another. The introduced
gene is then expressed in the receiving organism. For example, the soil bacterium Bacillus
thuringiensis (Bt) produces a crystal protein that is toxic to specific classes of insects. The
gene that codes for this protein has been cloned into the maize ( Zea mays ) plant genome
enabling the maize plant to produce the insecticidal protein in its own tissues. An organism,
in this case the maize plant, that receives a gene from another species is called transgenic . If
the introduced gene is from the same species, the resulting organism is called cisgenic .
GM agriculture is, by and large, based on the same agri-industrial paradigm as con-
ventional agriculture (Levidow and Boschert 2008). However, the advent of GM agri-
culture could lead to four basic agroecologies: GM conventional, non-GM conventional,
organic, and GM organic. There are many variations on these basic approaches to pro-
duction, including conservation agriculture, no or low-tillage systems, biodynamic sys-
tems, and other variations on organic agriculture, termed alternative farming systems.7
The use of some transgenic crops, particularly insect resistant (Bt) crops, may prove to
be the more sustainable of these agricultural paradigms, as their use has been shown to
decrease the use of chemical insecticides (Brookes and Barfoot 2010). GM organic is not
considered an option in the United States because the US organic industry disallows the
use of GM crops in certified organic agriculture.8 The ability to retain the integrity of
each production approach in the face of the new challenges presented by GM agricul-
ture is the central theme of this chapter.