by Mabi David, PANAP Agroecology in Action
The most favored and well-known rhetoric justifying novel biotechnology’s use in food among its enthusiasts and defenders is its supposed potential to save human lives. Immediately conferred upon every genetically engineered product designed to address challenges in food and agriculture is the virtuous halo of a humanitarian agenda.
There is the supersized cassava that would address hunger, the virus-resistant sweet potato that would feed Africa, the antioxidant-enhanced tomato to finally beat cancer. All these were dismal failures: a low-cost research that hybridized cassava species produced giant roots without the need for expensive proprietary technology, the GM sweet potato became susceptible to viruses it was meant to resist after a few years, and that cancer-fighting tomato, says Cancer Research UK, is not likely to cure such a complex disease.
But despite GM’s history of failed promises, industry-backed research persistently peddles these high-tech products as miraculous cure-alls, with their ability to treat everything, from pests to poverty, with utmost efficiency. Techno-food industrialists like Bill Gates preach technology as the solution that humanity needs to live life food secure and climate resilient. Despite full-throated claims of GMOs’ benefits to people’s lives, their decades of chest thumping have nothing to show for and remain blind to the complexity of the problem of hunger and a fast-warming planet. These techno-fixes ignore the fact that the double crises of global hunger and climate catastrophe are actually linked to the corporatization of food and agriculture, of which the privatization of seeds via GMOs is their major investment focus.
Thus, unsurprisingly, the decades-long global grassroots movement fighting GMOs, more recently the victory in the Philippines against the commercialization of GM products Golden Rice and Bt Eggplant and the Mexican government’s GM-corn ban, are often attacked by the GMO industry, its lobbyists and PR consultants, as assaults on humanity and progress.
All this is deeply ironic given the question of safety has long hounded transgenics in food. Lacking independent studies on the risks of long-term exposure, whether through farm use or human and animal consumption, the safety of GM technology and its products remain unresolved and highly controversial. Instead GM proponents sweep this under the rug by positioning the technology as part of the continuum of crop domestication that has existed for thousands of years, advancing the principle of substantial equivalence (which means GMOs and their natural counterparts are the same in terms of safety and nutrition) as adequate and therefore the GM versions should be as benign, fit for planting and consumption.
But what we’re seeing is that the GM transformation process is far from predictable. Genetic modification can have unintended changes on the natural composition of the plant beyond those originally intended, which can have health implications on those growing and eating it, and making the idea of substantial equivalence problematic and insufficient.
Pro-GM rhetoric also prefers to obscure, if not altogether ignore, the historical, social and political contexts of the use and ownership of the technology, which is inextricable to discourses of control and power over the food system, despite their claims to the contrary. In doing so, life, which genetic engineering purports to be in the service of, is instead instrumentalized for profit, and then turned into a testing ground for its experiments, where any sort of harm that arises is justified as the price of progress that humanity (more accurately, those with the least power) must pay.
And pay with our lives we do. Ordinary people—from farmers finding their seeds and farms irreversibly contaminated to eaters being exposed to untested products with genetically engineered toxins and highly hazardous pesticides—are simply expected to bear the brunt of their impacts. In fact, it’s not uncommon for communities to be caught unaware that they have been turned into experimental subjects of hidden GMO fields and feeding trials in their areas, not having been consulted and with little to no recourse to legal remediation in the face of adverse impacts.
Nonetheless the biotech industry remains prodigious and unrelenting in its development of agri-technologies, undergirded by the techno-optimist’s belief that there is no problem that cannot be solved with more technology. But for all its posturing as being cutting edge and state of the art, it is upheld by an outdated centuries-old imperialist worldview.
The productivism at the core of the feed-the-world narratives perpetuated by GM apologists is tied to the colonial agriculture system that is the monoculture plantation which, in its prioritization of yield, scale, efficiency, and profitability, continues the plantation’s logic and legacy of profit maximization through resource extraction for export markets and slavery/labor exploitation in global food supply chains. A new CRISPR-driven gene technology that’s gaining recognition as vital to pest control innovations in agricultural systems to protect productivism is the gene drive, with its manipulation of the sexual reproductive mechanisms in living organisms to cause the auto-extinction of populations or species deemed undesirable or harmful. Specifically these are wild plant populations that are considered threats to the production of commodity crops, labeled as weeds that must be disposed of, but which are actually edible and nutritious food crops in peasant communities. An example is the Amaranthus palmeri, a drought-resistant plant once widely eaten by Native Americans that is among the targets of a gene drive technology known as ClvR given it has evolved to be herbicide resistant and can take over corn and soybean monocultures. The logic of the gene drive strikes one as shaped by the logic of eugenics, driven by the colonizer-mindset of Euro-white supremacy over native and non-white peoples. And despite “carrying a high degree of scientific uncertainty and unpredictability,” it’s an opportunity that’s not lost on the military and Monsanto. The Gates Foundation in turn intends to pilot the technology in two villages in Burkina Faso in Africa under the Target Malaria research project to fight malaria, ignoring pathways to potential harm identified and numerous studies that show the prevalence of disease as mostly linked to poverty, and sidelining more accessible, low-risk interventions.
The governing ideology of techo-fixes and white supremacy behind gene editing is an enduring one, the latest iteration of which is the widely circulated and quoted op-ed from The Guardian, which called the Golden Rice ruling “a depressing scenario…a catastrophe that could result in the deaths of thousands of children in coming years” and laid the blame at the feet of a “misguided” movement. This prompted a response from the farmer-scientist network MASIPAG, an IPAM field learning site and lead petitioner in the case, that calls out the harmful insinuation that “our local solutions are backward, not at scale, disjointed from reality, and unscientific.” More importantly it exposes the colonialism that often lurks behind the justification of GMOs, which position corporate-led interventions as “saviors” while belittling valid concerns of the communities on the ground who will be the ones growing and eating these GMOs and denigrating their people–led solutions that have proven effective such as agroecology.
Over the years, with its history of failed promises and inhumane consequences, the treasured defense of GMOs as the perfect combination of objective, moral, and incontrovertibly beneficial is no longer sacrosanct. Rather it has grown threadbare as conversations about how to meet the challenges in our food system, especially our ability to feed each and every one, evolve from the limits of productivity and efficiency towards questions of justice and equity. Look just a little more closely and GM’s humanitarian logic easily falls apart.
Note: This article was updated on July 29, 2024, to provide an example of the gene drive’s use in agriculture.
