ENVS 411 Reading Summary: Seeds and Genetically Modified Organisms 24 January 2007 12:34 pm
Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,books,environment,GMOs,school,sundance,sustainability , trackbackSo we finished watching The Future of Food in my environmental studies class, Sustainable Agriculture, today. It’s still a really painful movie, full of rhetoric that makes me want to disagree even when the facts are on my side, but I took notes and will compose an appropriately snarky response in the not-too-distant future. (We also watched a little clip from an older PBS special called Harvest of Fear, which might be worth checking out at some point if the library’s still got it.) In the meantime, this week’s assigned readings were:
“Global Claims” and “Epilogue: The Story” from Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money and the Future of Food by Daniel Charles (2001)
“The Genie in the Genome: Bioengineering in Context” and “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World: Sustaining Traditional Farming and Genetic Resources” from Food’s Frontier: The Next Green Revolution by Richard Manning (2000)
“Globalization and the War Against Farmers and the Land” by Vandana Shiva, from The Essential Agrarian Reader (Norman Wirzba, ed. 2003)
“Sowing Disaster? How Genetically Engineered American Corn Has Altered the Global Landscape” by Mark Shapiro (The Nation, 28 October 2002).
and here’s a slightly modified version of my original two-page response to those readings, complete with a preview of my Future of Food rant at the end. Also references to ninjas and whup-ass in the beginning, which got a cautious “that’s, um, original” comment from the grader, to which I can only say, “yay! I got away with rampant silliness!”
*****
Bioengineering, biotechnology, Frankenfoods, genetic engineering, genetic manipulation, genetic modification, transgenics: call it these or any other names, and the subject invariably makes me react in two ways. One, I want to become an intellectual property law ninja and open a can of Creative Commons/free software style whup-ass on the likes of anybody who thinks genes can, much less should, be patented, copyrighted, or otherwise owned in any way that makes it harder for everybody to share and share alike and learn as fast as we possibly can about this stuff, like it seems obvious to me we need to. The science and technology are hard enough without extra bonus bitchiness about who owns what idea, and besides, information wants to be free, dangit! Two, I want to eat only certified organic soy and corn, just to be on the safe side, even though I know it’s not really a safe side because there’s all kinds of cross-contamination.
Last October I went to the Provender Alliance natural foods industry conference and saw a panel discussion in which Albert Straus, founder of Straus Family Creamery, revealed that his organic dairy has been testing their certified organic animal feed for GMOs and found up to 30% contamination. So Mark Schapiro’s article, “Sowing Disaster? How Genetically Engineered American Corn Has Altered the Global Landscape” (The Nation, 28 October 2002) wasn’t a surprise, but it did renew my commitment to organic corn. It makes me feel better to at least try to avoid the Bt and RoundUp Ready stuff, and if my little boycott is part of a larger anti-GMO consumer trend that helps big business decide that transgenics aren’t profitable enough to warrant investing in their research funding, so much the better. Maybe transgenic foods will go the way CFCs did when enough people got serious about the hole in the ozone layer. (Hey, I can dream.)
To get back to being all pragmatic and business-oriented, I’ll say that I enjoyed reading the Daniel Charles chapters (“Global Claims” and “Epilogue: The Story”) for their perspective on Monsanto’s business and technological troubles. I checked Lords of the Harvest out of the Eugene Public Library and look forward to reading more on the subject, and deciding if I agree with comparisons between Monsanto and Microsoft, again with my previously-mentioned free software geek tendencies on full throttle. Likewise, I appreciated the realism and careful dissection of terms in the genetic engineering chapter of Richard Manning’s Food’s Frontier (and I’m curious about the history of the genie/bottle metaphor in discussing genetic engineering, which appears in Manning’s chapter title and the conclusion of Schapiro’s piece). I had not previously given a great deal of thought to the real-world difficulties involved in labeling transgenic foods, although personally I wouldn’t mind more information of the kind he suggests as alternatives/additions to just the GMO information:
Ought we not begin, though, by labeling those potatoes that have seen a dozen or more applications of the mixture of pesticides the Chilean farmers call la bomba? Labeling soybeans that are grown by plowing up valuable wildlife habitat? Labeling tomatoes grown through exploitation of cheap immigrant labor?” (Manning 198)
My answer to these questions is: Who cares where we begin, as long as we do? All those labels are good places to start, and I’m not the only consumer willing to pay more for certified organic and fair trade and GMO-free food. Here’s hoping more and more companies start offering that kind of information as a service along with their products.
Now I feel incredibly privileged to have the option of voting with my dollars against transgenic foods by buying organic. A stark contrast is the Zambian and Zimbabwean government’s rejection of GM food aid at the 2002 Johannesburg Earth Summit, which I did not know about before reading Vandana Shiva’s essay in The Essential Agrarian Reader. (Of course, a cynical way of looking at it is that the delegates to Johannesburg were essentially volunteering others to starve for a principle, and reading that story again in “Sowing Disaster,” made me wonder if the African countries’ defiant gesture was too little, too late, and how much of their agriculture was already contaminated — to use the African Civil Society statement’s rhetoric, colonized — by GM crops, as in Capulalpan, Mexico.)
Maybe I’ve been brainwashed by my science- and technology-oriented undergraduate education, but a lot of anti-GMO propaganda really rubs me the wrong way. You can bet Shiva’s quantum physics background makes her a much more credible voice to me than say, Deborah Koontz Garcia in her film The Future of Food, another highlight of the Provender conference, which drove me insane with its scientific illiteracy and use of hysterical scare tactics. (My notes on the movie devolved very rapidly into “booga booga viruses! booga booga bacteria!” and the observation that the same people who love real yogurt for its Acidophilus and other friendly microorganisms are the ones freaking out about bacterial DNA in some GM crops. Personally, I’m a lot more freaked out that recombinant DNA technology exploits antibiotic resistance and probably adds to it. But I digress.) It was great to read so much well-reasoned discussion of transgenics in a broader social, political, historical, and technological context than a bunch of flaky hippies freaking out about their food allergies, and I especially appreciated the emphasis on agriculture itself as biotechnology and as such, just as much in need of reform, regulation, and sustainability.
