The Dialectic of Pro-Poor Papaya - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 766

did consumers apparently express any enthusiasm about the prospect of being able
to eat virus-free, cheaper, domestically produced papaya. Media access and savvy
also prove to be important in GM politics. Media coverage was minimal in advance
oftheintroduction,enablingGreenpeacetoestablishapoliticaldebatethatrelected
its own perspective as the dominant narrative; there is a first-mover advantage in
politics as in business. The case also illustrates a common phenomenon in the sociol-
ogy of science communications: Failure to put credible and useful information into
the public domain in terms resonant with popular understandings of agriculture and
science prevalent in mass publics can diminish public acceptance of new technolo-
gies. Transparency is limited by the isolation and technical difficulty of much scien-
tiicwork,contributingtoafailuretomobilizepotentiallysupportivestakeholder
constituencies to participate in a more inclusive and science-based debate. But sci-
entists in any event do not typically see political advocacy as their job or comparative
advantage.
New technologies, especially those producing food, face an uphill struggle for many
reasons,asthelongEuropeandebateshaveshown(Bonny2003;Tait2001).Evenwhen
a biotech crop appears to have become widely accepted and established, as has been the
case in Hawaii with transgenic papaya, successes are not irrevocable and progress can
beunexpectedlyreversed.In2013inHawaiiawidespreadandpolarizingpublicdebate
took place about whether multinational companies developing transgenic seeds should
be targeted with new restrictive local legislation. The spillover of this debate has also
negatively affected public perceptions of the long-established GE virus-resistant papaya.
Orchards were damaged or destroyed by vandalism and vocal demands made for the
whole industry to be eradicated and replaced with virus-susceptible organic crops
(Harmon2014).Despitehavingoperatedapparentlysuccessfullyandwithlittlechal-
lengefornearlytwodecades,Hawaii'spapayagrowersnowfacetheveryrealprospectof
losing the disease-resistance technology on which they have come to depend.
The case also has lessons for understanding the political obstacles to increased adop-
tion of transgenic crops. Opposition of anti-GE activists is deep-seated and persistent;
it has proved resistant to contrary factual information or ameliorative policy measures
toaddressspeciicobjections,suchasseedpatentingorcorporateownership.Inthis
sense, anti-GE activists mirror those opposing technological applications in other sec-
tors, such as the vaccination of children or the use of anti-retroviral drugs to combat
HIV/AIDS(Lewandowskyet al.2013).hewidespreadInternet-baseddisseminationof
demonstrably false conspiracy theories on GE is further supportive of this conclusion
and suggests that tackling specific fears with only scientifically derived factual informa-
tion may not have much impact and may even be counterproductive.
Risks and benefits of GE crops will remain a highly contested area for many years to
come.Asaconsequence,concernsaboutrealrisksnottargetedbypoliticalmobilization
remain unaddressed. Through this skewing of political practice, well-established poten-
tial benefits are foregone: in Thailand, transgenic virus-resistant papaya seeds remain
locked in a refrigerator, while ring-spot virus continues to damage conventional papaya
production(Waltz2009).InHawaii,DenisGonsalveshasbeenforcedoutofretirement