Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
agriculture as an economic activity, in which outcomes are dependent upon so many
variables, all of them difficult to control for. It is extremely difficult, for example, to sepa-
rate out the effects of technology from the social context in which it is introduced—and
this can be used both in defense of technology (“It's not MVs but government subsi-
dies that have caused these negative outcomes”) and to critique it (as when it is argued
that biotechnology is inherently supportive of the corporate control of agriculture).
The methodologies employed in empirical research are subject to severe limitations (as
Stone 2012 and Orr 2012 show), and much depends, in the case of social and economic
research, upon the factors of time and space—when and where research has been car-
ried out. These circumstances give great scope for epistemic brokers and the framings
they offer of the “evidence.” They also mean that is vital both for research results to be
subjected to rigorous methodological scrutiny (not necessarily accomplished through
the regular process of scientific peer reviewing; see Stone 2012), and for the ways in
which evidence has been framed to be recognized. As Giddens says, even if “nothing is
certain,” science is still the source of “the most dependable information to which we can
a s p i r e .”
At the same time, it must be recognized that although public policy should be
informed by scientific “evidence,” it cannot be dictated by “evidence.” Policymakers have
to exercise judgment. In doing so they should take account above all of what will con-
tribute to human well-being. Would it have been right for policymakers in the 1960s
to have opposed the introduction of MVs? While improved agricultural productiv-
ity and the well-being of masses of rural people in Asia and Latin America might well
have been realized more effectively had there been thoroughgoing redistributive land
reform—had the social and political problems that were sought to be “fixed” by technol-
ogy been addressed, in other words—this was not practical politics at the time. It was
surely right, in the circumstances they confronted, for policymakers to have encour-
aged the introduction of the new varieties—though they would have done well to have
paid more attention than was usually the case to the negative implications of modern
agriculture. They would have done well to have recognized that the MVs did not rep-
resent
the
(sole) answer to the problems they were addressing. In regard to transgenics,
we have suggested that policymakers have to weigh the irreducible uncertainty about
their possible impacts on human health and the environment against the definable risks
associated with alternatives, or with the status quo (as in the case of brinjal cultivation in
India). As they do so, they should recognize that transgenics have been very successfully
framed as being uniquely risky plants (
pace
Glover's view that
Bt
cotton has been subject
to unduly positive framing—2010), when the evidence for this is limited, as the GMO
Panel of the European Food Safety Authority—not a protagonist of the technology—
found. It should be recognized, too, as many of the critics of this technology have not,
that there is an important difference between transgenic hybrids and open-pollinated
varieties. Transgenics are, inherently, just like the Green Revolution, neither “good” nor
“bad.” But at present the way in which they have so effectively been subjected to negative
framing by anti-GMO campaigners makes careful, critical judgment more difficult—
and more than ever necessary.
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