The Dialectic of Pro-Poor Papaya - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 763

charges for “alleged negligence involving the leakage of GM papaya seeds from the sta-
tion,” as the Bangkok Post putit(Samabuddhi2004).
Victory for the anti-GE campaigners was finally cemented when the prime minister,
backed by a cabinet decision, ordered the destruction of all GE field trials in the coun-
trytwomonthsatertheinitialGreenpeaceaction(Waltz2009).hecombinedefectof
Greenpeace'sdirectactionand“contamination”revelations,theensuingscandal,andthe
resulting passage of prohibitive legislation was to bring all agricultural biotechnology in
hailandtoavirtualstandstill—asituationthatpersistsmoreorlessunchangedtothisday.
Itisimportanttoemphasizethatnotonlytransgenicpapayawasafectedbythenew
more hostile political climate ushered in by the papaya scandal. Earlier GE crops trialed in
Thailand had included chili and tomato resistant to viral diseases, yard-long bean and cot-
ton resistant to insect pests, and rice resistant to ragged stunt virus and tolerant to saline
conditions(AttathomandNavarro2011).Followingthecabinetandprimeminister'sban,
none of these projects could be continued or restarted, and to date all projects are either
dormant or have been abandoned. Moreover, although twelve GE crop events received
earlier official approval in Thailand (all for herbicide-tolerance and insect-resistance traits
inmaizeandsoybean),noneareincommercialcultivation(ISAAA).
AlthoughGreenpeace'scampaignclearlyhadenormousimpact,itdidnotariseina
vacuum—GEieldtrialshadlongbeencontroversial,withNGO-ledprotestsoverBt
cottonieldtrialsleadingtoanearliersuspensionofieldtrialsin2001.Inaddition,the
politicalinstabilitythatenvelopedhailandfollowingtheSeptember2006coupagainst
the Thaksin government made it impossible to resolve the situation clearly, with sev-
eral changes of government and ongoing deadlock between monarchist protesters and
pro-Thaksin government supporters on the streets of Bangkok.
Whenspeciicministersdidtrytomoveforward,anti-GEcampaignersremobilized
to stop them: the post-coup agriculture minister Thira Sutabutra was ready to submit
aproposaltocabinetinAugust2007tolittheGEbanbutheldbackaterGreenpeace
protesters dressed as “zombie fruits” and wearing alien eyeballs dumped 10 metric
tonsofpapaya(labeled“GMO?”)outsidetheAgricultureMinistry(Davidson2008).
Embarrassingly for Greenpeace, all papayas were quickly scooped up and carried away
by street crowds and workers in the ministry.
Itisnotablealsothatthepro-andanti-GEforcesinhailanddonotdividealongparty
linesinwhatisaverypoliticallypolarizedcountry: instead,theanti-GEcampaignhasunited
a coalition of civil society NGOs, led informally on occasion by Greenpeace in a so-far suc-
cessful campaign to prevent GE innovations from being tested or adopted in Thailand.
Conclusions
To return to some themes highlighted in the introduction to this chapter, we now
consider what the virus-resistant papaya case study suggests in terms of reasons for
the slow uptake of biotechnology outside the realm of a small number of large-scale