13 Science Studies and the GMO Conflict
Within the GMO debates, social scientists have found a rich trove of data to explore questions on the interactions between science and society. Beyond the technical scientific questions, social scientists explore issues such as, What factors shape the public acceptance or rejection of a new technology? What role does science play in the social narratives and policy struggles that take place both within and across national boundaries? How do we understand conflicting perspectives within the sciences? These issues drive scholarly work in science and technology studies (STS). Science studies gained traction as a discipline in the 1960s contemporaneously with the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn’s exploration into the history of science shows that to understand revolutionary change in science, we need to look outside of science. Moreover, Kuhn denies that science is constantly approaching the truth. Rather, it builds paradigms—conceptual models or theories that help us understand the physical world. When one paradigm displaces another, it does not happen by scientific logic alone.
The STS tradition views science as a group of technical disciplines that engage dialectically (via a mutual interaction of different perspectives toward a synthesis) with the society in which it is embedded. Science shapes society, and society shapes science. Given the multidecade conflict over GMOs, it is not surprising that STS investigators have sought to bring clarity to the conflicting perspectives and have been called on to explain differences among scientific groups and between the science establishment and the public. Steven Yearley explains the STS interest in food biotechnology: “the case of GMOs is of wide interest to STS researchers because of the light it throws on comparative safety assessment and the interpretation of scientific evidence and precaution in international perspective.”1
A clear expression of the STS approach toward GMOs is given by Amaranta Herrero, Fern Wickson, and Rosa Binimelis: “Researchers have typically conceived and assessed GMOs as neutral, autonomous and individualized technological objects, ignoring the socio-economic and ecological relations these technologies require, create, and or perform. In fact, as any technology, GMOs do not exist in a vacuum but operate as a socio-technical and socio-ecological systems. They inevitably affect and are affected by the networks of relations in which they both circulate and generate.”2
In her book Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States, Sheila Jasanoff writes: “For politically engaged scholars of science and technology in society, following the scientists around … provides only a tiny peephole on the power of science. It is just as necessary to chart the trajectories of the myriad other social actors whose values and expectations interpenetrate with those of scientists and inventors, creating the conditions in which scientific ideas are translated into material and social realities.”3 Jasanoff’s book explores how three different political cultures (Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States) have addressed GMOs by navigating through a common body of international science within their unique “culturally conditioned framings.”
The STS scholarship has sought to understand the structural frameworks within which the GMO controversy is embedded and the ways that stakeholder interpretations of those frameworks explain the persistence of contested science and policies. Paramount among the frameworks examined are risk assessment, the political economy of GMO agriculture (including the corporate hegemonic control of GMO agriculture), and the intellectual property regime of genetically engineered crops.
Risk Assessment
The health and environmental concerns of genetically engineered crops have been a central theme among GMO skeptics. The response by GMO seed developers and federal agencies was to turn the issue into scientific risk assessment. In the United States, this has meant reframing the risk issue into a nonissue by asserting the principle of “substantial equivalence” and arguing that traditional breeding and molecular breeding have equal risks for creating unsafe crops. In contrast, the European Union has established requirements for testing whole GMO foods, setting barriers for the importation of GE crops and planting of GE seeds. STS scholarship has traditionally investigated risk assessment for a wide range of technologies. Building on the rich contributions to risk studies, the GMO scholarship has distinguished between technical and cultural concepts of risk. In the former case, risk analysis is a scientific program that is distinct from policy and values. In the latter case, risk is a highly politicized concept that cannot be separated from value judgments. In other words, under the cultural framework, risk is socially constructed. Yearley notes, "in the larger European countries there has not tended to be a single agency charged with making such [GMO] precise risk calculations.… If risk could be objectively assessed, there should be no need for segregated responsibility.”4
For example, Marjolein B. A. Van Asselt and Ellen Vos see GMOs as embodying “uncertain risks,” as distinguished from “traditional, simple risks,” which can be understood in terms of statistical techniques.5 Skepticism among stakeholders and scientists toward GMOs is rooted in the refusal and inability of corporations and agencies to address uncertain risks leading to what the authors call “organized irresponsibility.” This amounts to hiding behind “overconfidence” and ignoring “uncertainty,” otherwise known as “uncertainty intolerance.” Building on the wealth of scholarship on the sociology, social psychology, and anthropology of risk,6 STS scholars classify different risk cultures and emphasize that risk analysis is intrinsically a social process.7
Alternatively, non-STS scholars view risk as strictly a scientific concept but as one that is vulnerable to distortions by cultural values. Ronald Herring and Robert Paarlberg try to understand why Bt cotton was accepted in India but Bt eggplant was rejected. Rather than addressing cultural differences in the standards for accepting an industrial product (cotton) in contrast to a food product (eggplant), they focus on the universality of the science of risk assessment. They argue: “Food crops are inherently susceptible to anxiety framings of importance to consumers.”8 Even without credible scientific evidence of health risk, the authors claim that critics were able to raise unsubstantiated concerns about a potential toxin in Bt eggplant, which influenced the Indian authorities to restrict the product. But as the authors note, the authorities were influenced not just by potential risks but also by “public worries about the domination of India’s food supply by Monsanto.”9 This brings us to political economy as a divisive frame for GE crops.
The Political Economy of GMO Agriculture
The introduction of biotechnology to plant breeding was accompanied by a set of changes in the seed industry. These changes brought seed development more in line with industrial capitalism and the commodification of agriculture. Traditional breeding took place in laboratories and greenhouses but was laborious, time consuming, and inefficient compared to molecular breeding, which had less trial and error but was still laborious. Small seed developers were viewed as vestigial remains of a nineteenth-century production system. Neoliberal restructuring of agriculture saw a concentration in the seed industry that allowed GMO seed manufacturers to gain hegemony over U.S. agriculture.
Agricultural sociologists introduced the term food regimes to distinguish neoliberal from traditional food economies. A food regime has been defined as a “rule-governed structure of production and consumption of food on a world scale.”10 Philip McMichael notes that
food regime analysis is key to understanding a foundational divide between environmentally catastrophic agro-industrialisation and alternative, agroecological practices that is coming to a head now as we face a historic threshold governed by peak oil, peak soil, climate change, and malnutrition of the “stuffed and starved” kind across the world. This divide is, arguably, endemic to capitalism, and its food regime at large—generating a rising skepticism regarding the ecological and health impact of industrial food, … and a gathering of food sovereignty movements across the world … to reverse the modernist narrative of smallholder obsolescence etched into the development paradigm and current development industry visions of “feeding the world..”11
The GMO divide has grown across competing food regimes and has distinguished traditional food economies (agro-ecological, low- or no-pesticide farming with local and regional farm distribution) from global, industrial, fossil-fuel-based agriculture.
One of the notable transformations in GMO agriculture is the changing relationship between seed developers or breeders and farmers. This is best illustrated by some changes that Monsanto instituted. Under Monsanto’s technology stewardship agreement, farmers are granted a limited license to use Roundup Ready seeds. The company licenses its seeds to growers analogous to the way that Microsoft licenses its software to computer users. The seed is said to contain Monsanto technologies—namely, the transgenes and methods of constructing the GMO. Anyone who uses the seed or technology must have a licensing agreement with Monsanto. A grower cannot share the seeds with another grower. The agreement states that the grower is “Not to transfer any seed containing patented Monsanto technologies to any other person or entity for planting.”12 Growers must allow Monsanto access to their crop land to obtain any samples of crops and seeds for inspection. The grower cannot do research on the seeds or crops produced from it. Thus, for the first time in the history of agriculture, farmers do not own and fully control their seeds. They lease them from Monsanto—or so it seems. This transformation in the seed economy has contributed to the GMO opposition among traditional farmers and food activists.
Herring and Paarlberg, two astute observers of food biotechnology, emphasize the role that political economy has had on the opposition to GMO adoption. They write that “The blockage of GE food crops does not derive from scientific evidence of new risks.… [A] new structure of transnational resistance to modern farming had emerged driven by opponents of corporate-led globalization and by advocates for the environment.”13 The patenting of genetically engineered crops was part of the antiglobalization opposition.
Intellectual Property Regime
How has the STS scholarship interpreted the importance of patenting of GMOs as a key factor in public opposition? Early opposition to GMOs was ignited when patents were issued to genetically engineered seeds. In her book Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, anti-GMO international activist Vandana Shiva writes that “Patenting living organisms encourages two forms of violence. First, life-forms are treated as if they are mere machines, thus denying their self-organizing capacity. Second, by allowing the patenting of future generations of plants and animals, the self-reproducing capacity of living organisms is denied.”14
The tradition of patenting in the United States is rooted in the Constitution. The Patent Act of 1790 establishes that patents will be issued to any person who has “invented or discovered any new and useful art, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any improvement of these not before known or used.”15 Patenting of microorganisms grew out of that tradition “if they have been identified and isolated for the first time and shown to have practical utility.”16 For example, Louis Pasteur was awarded a U.S. patent for purified yeast in 1873, but not until the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty in 1980 was a bacterium awarded a patent that was independent of being part of a process. That was soon followed by the patenting of genetically modified crops.
After patents were issued for seeds developed through molecular breeding, the economic relationship between plant breeder and growers was transformed from seed ownership to seed stewardship. Power relations shifted from grower to plant breeder and owner of the intellectual property. This became the grist for opposition to GMOs.
In a 2003 letter to Nature Biotechnology, Jerry Cayford of Resources for the Future writes that it is a misleading assumption that the controversy over GMOs is about risk or the extent to which genetically modified crops differ from traditionally bred crops: “What underlies the controversy is whether crop germplasm is [in the] public domain or privately owned through patents on plants and animals. If scientists really want to address the root of opposition to transgenic food, they first need to acknowledge what that underlying root is: monopoly control of the world’s food supply.”17 In another letter interchange in Science, Cayford states that GMO critics will not “ease their hard line on biosafety” unless patenting is reexamined: “It is the patenting of crops that biotechnology critics find so antidemocratic. To these critics, the patenting of the world’s food supply by corporations is an assault on democracy more enormous than any military assault.”18
The European opposition to patenting animals and plants prompted a thousand farmers to demonstrate before the European Patent Office in Munich on April 15, 2009. The international environmental group Greenpeace challenged a European patent application by Plant Genetic Systems for a transgenic plant that was tolerant to the herbicide Basta. The patent challenge was based on the principle of “ordre public” in article 53(a) of the European Patent Convention that it was immoral to own patents of material that was the common heritage of humankind.19 The board of appeals of the European Patent Office ruled that the revocation of a patent on environmental grounds under article 53(a) of the 1973 convention required that the hazard be sufficiently substantiated. It would not deny a patent on possible but not conclusively documented risks.20 Patenting of life forms sui generis became the new normal.
Corporate Hegemonic Control
Patents, as a means to gain monopoly control of germplasm, are one of the methods used to achieve hegemony over the agricultural system. The term biohegemony has been used by social scientists to describe the methods that biotechnology corporations have used to leverage greater concentration of ownership and control over the food system and to keep agrarian reform of agriculture and agro-ecology movements at bay. The technological control is only one part of the path to hegemony. GMO skeptics are as suspicious of corporate power as they are of the health and safety of the transgenic crops.
For a small group of agricultural seed producers to gain control over a nation’s agricultural system, they need to have close political ties to the political elites in the country, be well embedded in international trade organizations, have a strong influence in the agricultural science community and large farmer organizations, and have a strong influential presence in the national media. GMO seed producers need to convince government officials that biotechnology will earn them money in foreign exports and that their support of harmonization, rather than cultural differentiation in biotech policies, will advance their national interests.
One of the strongest examples illustrating biohegemony can be found in Peter Newell’s case analysis of biotechnology in Argentina, a country where the agricultural biotechnology sector has amassed hegemonic control. As Newell writes:
The hegemonic discourse in Argentina regarding agricultural biotechnology is that it represents an important, economically significant, socially beneficial, safe, and environmentally benign technology. This is sustained through government speeches and policy documents, the publicity work of individual companies and associations through seminars, conferences, press conferences, constant advertising in the media aimed at policy and public audiences, and through billboards in the countryside aimed at reaching farmers directly.21
For some agricultural communities, adopting GMOs means that they are buying into a new corporate-centric food system where farmers become serfs to the seed producers and their patent-holding companies. In 2004, the residents of Mendocino County, California, voted to ban GMOs from their agricultural land. Measure H—an ordinance titled “Prohibition of the Propagation, Cultivation, Raising, and Growing of Genetically Modified Organisms in Mendocino County”—was directed at those organisms whose “native intrinsic DNA has been intentionally altered or amended with non-species specific DNA.” The issues of concern included local control of agriculture (civic agriculture) as opposed to corporate control over local life, equity distribution of power, and contamination of organic farms with GMO pollen. Residents had embraced a food culture that was inconsistent with GMO agriculture.
Risk has not been viewed strictly in terms of the food products but was based on the lack of trust in the GMO enterprise, as has become clear in the STS scholarship: “Measure H proved to be about much more than biotechnology. It served as a lightning rod and symbol of wider social and political issues, many of which reflect tensions between the conventional agricultural system and … civic agriculture … the embedding of local agriculture and food production in the community.”22 Proposals to turn skepticism about GMOs in developing countries to support include a larger role for public research institutions that would forego intellectual property claims for new varieties, similar to what occurred during the Green Revolution.23
A case study in Science Studies by Pablo Pellegrini of one of the most influential farming organization in Brazil—Movimento Sem Terra (MST)—explores the arguments behind its opposition to GMOs. MST mobilized its anti-GMO actions around issues of uncertainty about health and environment effects, protection of local needs, protection of landraces and agroecology, and concerns over economic concentration, where local farmers lose control to multinational corporations. In its literature, MST states that “GM products and seed research undertaken by corporations only aim to increase their profits and not the population’s welfare. The dominance of biotechnology and the use of GMOs are moving towards a world seed oligopoly controlled by just eight major economic groups.”24
Biohegemony in STS studies also includes control over the sciences. Johan Diels and his colleagues reveal the impact of corporate funding of GMO studies: “In a study involving 94 articles … it was found that the existence of either financial or professional conflict of interest was associated with study outcomes that cast genetically modified products in a favorable light.… [A] strong association was found between author affiliation to industry … and study outcomes.”25
Many factors revealed in the STS scholarship feed the continuing GMO debates. As noted by Renata Motta, “social disputes over GMOs will remain controversial, as there is neither a sole explanation nor a simple solution for them.”26 And neither expertise nor participatory exercises have contributed to a decrease in the controversy.
In conclusion, the STS scholarship has shown that public skepticism or opposition to GMOs is not simply grounded in risk or differences between GMOs and traditional crops. The new technology carries with it new corporate power arrangements, intellectual property controls, unanticipated outcomes, and threats of an increasing concentration and vertical integration of food production. Even without a clear and present danger of GMO risks and with only uncertainties and lack of trusted oversight, the opposition has been built on changes that have intensified a neoliberal political economy of agriculture, reduced the influence of growers and consumers, and centralized power among the oligopoly of molecular breeders and food distributors.
Notes
1. Steven Yearley, “Nature and the Environment: Science and Technology Studies,” in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd ed., ed. Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael E. Lynch, and Judy Wajcman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 921–947 at 937.
2. Amaranta Herrero, Fern Wickson, and Rosa Binimelis, “Seeing GMOs from a Systems Perspective: The Need for Comparative Cartographies of Agri/Cultures for Sustainability Assessment,” Sustainability 7 (2015): 11322.
3. Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 290.
4. Steven Yearley, “Mapping and Interpreting Societal Responses to Genetically Modified Crops and Food,” Social Studies of Science 31, no. 1 (2001): 151–160.
5. Marjolein B. A. van Asselt and Ellen Vos, “Wrestling with Uncertain Risks: EU Regulation of GMOs and the Uncertainty Paradox,” Journal of Risk Research 11, no. 1–2 (2008): 281–300.
6. Sheldon Krimsky and Dominic Golding, Social Theories of Risk (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992).
7. Renata Motta, “Social Disputes over GMOs: An Overview,” Sociology Compass 8, no. 12 (2014): 1360–1376.
8. Ronald Herring and Robert Paarlberg, “The Political Economy of Biotechnology,” Annual Review of Resource Economics 8 (2016): 410.
9. Herring and Paarlberg, “The Political Economy of Biotechnology,” 411.
10. Philip McMichael, “A Food Regime Genealogy,” Journal of Peasant Studies 36, no. 1 (2009): 142.
11. McMichael, “A Food Regime Genealogy,” 141.
12. Monsanto, “Monsanto Technology/Stewardship Agreement,” 2011, https://
13. Herring and Paarlberg, “The Political Economy of Biotechnology,” 400.
14. Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End Press, 1997), 33.
15. Patent Act of 1790, 1 Stat. 109-112, chap. 7, http://
16. R. Stephen Crespi, “An Analysis of Moral Issues Affecting Patenting Inventions in the Life Sciences: A European Perspective,” Science and Engineering Ethics 6 (2000): 159.
17. Jerry Cayford, “Resources for the Future,” letter, Nature Biotechnology 21 (2003): 493.
18. Jerry Cayford, “Resources for the Future.”
19. Crespi, “An Analysis of Moral Issues Affecting Patenting Inventions in the Life Sciences.”
20. Philippe Sands, Principles of International Environmental Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1048.
21. Peter Newell, “Bio-hegemony: The Political Economy of Agricultural Biotechnology in Argentina,” Journal of Latin American Studies 41 (2009): 53.
22. Marygold Walsh-Dilley, “Localizing Control: Mendocino County and the Ban on GMOs,” Agriculture and Human Values 26 (2009): 96.
23. Stephen B. Brush, “Genetically Modified Organisms in Peasant Farming: Social Impact and Equity,” Indian Journal of Global Legal Studies 9 (2001): 1–27.
24. Pablo Pellegrini, “Knowledge, Identity and Ideology in Stances on GMOs: The Case of the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil,” Science Studies 22, no. 1 (2009): 50.
25. Johan Diels, Marie Cunlia, Cólia Monaia, Bernardo Subugosa-Madeira, and Margarido Silva, “Association of Financial or Professional Conflict of Interest to Research Outcomes on Health Risks or Nutritional Assessment Studies of Genetically Modified Products,” Food Policy 36 (2011): 197.
26. Renata Motta, “Social Disputes over GMOs: An Overview,” Sociology Compass 8, no. 12 (2014): 1371.