Food7–27
doi: 10.5840/socphiltoday201461210
The GMO Quandary and
What It Means for Social Philosophy
Paul B. Thompson
Abstract: Agricultural crops developed using the tools of genetic engineering (so-called
“GMOs”) have become socially institutionalized in three ways that substantially compromise
the inherent potential of plant transformation tools. The first is that when farming depends
upon debt finance, farmers find themselves in a competitive situation such that efficiencyenhancing technology fuels a trend of bankruptcy and increasing scale of production. As
efficiency increasing tools, GMOs are embedded in controversial processes of social change in
rural economies. The United States, at least, has chosen not to undertake policy interventions
to slow or reverse this trend. The second institutionalization of GMOs is found in the way that
agricultural science has become divided between two camps, one focused on efficiency and
total global production, the other focused on maintaining soil and water ecosystems in the face
of both population growth and climate change. GMOs have been strongly supported by the
first camp and regarded as irrelevant (at best) to the goals of the second. Finally, GMOs have
become symbolic markers in the global debate over neoliberal institutions for trade and the
protection of intellectual property. While there may be agronomic arguments for favoring GMO
technology, the way that it has become situated in each of these social debates insures that it
will be subject to strong opposition without regard to its biological risks and potential benefits.
W
hat I am calling “the GMO quandary” is a complex set of conceptually and
empirically related issues, each of which might be debated at length on philosophical grounds. The GMO quandary is a wicked problem1 in that important
values are at stake, factual issues are shrouded in uncertainty, options for moving
forward are mutually exclusive and have irreversible consequences, but there is
no fundamental agreement on what the problem is. The acronym GMO stands
for ‘genetically modified organism,’ but as many have pointed out, this phrase is
potentially meaningless in the context of agriculture. Delimiting the scope of the
Social Philosophy Today, Volume 30
© 2014 Philosophy Documentation Center
ISSN: 1543-4044
Food
tools and techniques being considered is not trivial. Two specific applications of
plant genetic engineering represent over 90 percent of the GMOs in commercial
use, and these two applications have been applied primarily in three crops: corn,
soybeans and cotton, with a few applications in rice. But there are hundreds of
variations and combinations of the Bt gene, which protects plants against damage
from Lepidoptera, and the gene for resistance with glyphosate-based chemical weed
control. Both genes have been incorporated into dozens of plant varieties that are
not currently grown commercially, including wheat and eggplant, and there are
dozens of other applications for disease resistance and drought tolerance, most
which have not been widely adopted by farmers.2
The methods for introducing genes into organisms have grown steadily over
the last three decades and a number of transgenic animals have been produced
(though as of this writing no animals are approved for food). Techniques for generating stem cells and cloning mammals are used frequently in medical research.
When deployed on organisms used for food or raised in farm or ranch settings, they
are generally included under the heading of agricultural biotechnology and GMOs,
though they do not necessarily involve the transfer of genes from one creature or
species to another. The last five years alone have seen new methods for targeted
modification of organisms and for synthesis of entire genomes (Kuzma and Kokotovich 2011). The sheer diversity of techniques for modifying plant and animal
genomes contributes to the wickedness of the GMO quandary, in part because the
diversity both creates confusion among those who are not paying close attention to
the underlying technological capabilities and because there is debate about when and
whether these innovations trigger new regulatory burdens. A manageable discussion of philosophical and ethical issues thus requires a somewhat arbitrary decision
to focus attention on a subclass of issues, and in what follows I will implicitly be
emphasizing the genetically engineered agricultural crops that have already been
the primary focus of commercialization and controversy.
The most basic technique in plant biotechnology is tissue culture, which allows
technicians to regenerate an entire plant from a single cell. Tissue culture itself does
not involve alteration of a plant’s genome. It has been utterly uncontroversial, and
is widely used by breeders and seed companies that do not consider themselves to
be producing GMOs. However, tissue culture converts single-cell mutations from
being one-off biological oddities into technological possibilities with widespread
commercial potential. A genetic change in a single plant cell of any kind—root,
stem, leaf or flower—can easily become a whole plant capable of making seeds
that that will propagate the change throughout the entire organism. Plant scientists
quickly recognized that this gave them the ability to experiment with a variety of
techniques at their disposal for transforming cells in order to produce plants with
new traits having agricultural value. All of these techniques involve genetic novelty and modification, but not all of them involve the transfer of genes from one
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The GMO Quandary and What It Means for Social Philosophy
organism to another. Yet for reasons that have much more to do with language and
culture than with biology and ecology, only a subset of these techniques have been
environmentally or socially controversial. These were methods for insinuating a
sequence of nucleotides into the plant’s DNA, the result being what we colloquially
refer to as a GMO.
Thirty years ago, the techniques for creating a GMO were few and cumbersome. One of the initial controversies involved the use of antibiotic resistance genes
as markers. These genes had nothing to do with whatever it was that plant scientists
were hoping to accomplish, but were needed simply to certify that a genetic transformation had been accomplished. The concern was clear: If antibiotic resistance
genes become widely dispersed in nature as a result of their incorporation into
agricultural plants, the consequence would be an increase in antibiotic resistant
bacteria. In the wake of rapid sequencing technology and a suite of techniques for
targeted modification, markers are no longer necessary, but the concern over dispersion of artificially introduced genes has been generalized. Important issues revolve
around the question of whether this concern is justified, and whether it warrants
regulation and monitoring on environmental grounds. Closely related risk issues
concern the safety of using these techniques to transform plants that will be eaten
as food. All of these risk issues turn on the philosophical justification for adopting
assumptions about the goodness or badness of possible outcomes, the handling of
uncertainty and incompleteness in data and the public policies for managing the
risks of new technology.
Anyone with training in inductive logic and the philosophy of science can
readily imagine how these controversies go. I have my views on them, and my views
are shared by many of the scientists I know who work in biotechnology. But because
the controversies are at root philosophical, I recognize that they are unlikely to be
decisively resolved. Although I am inclined to think that a more detailed discussion of the epistemological issues would advance the quality of the debate, I must
eschew that discussion in the present context in order to concentrate on some social
dimensions of the controversy. However, it is important to notice that moving to
the social dimensions is itself controversial from the perspective of many scientists
on either side of the risk debates. They would assert that the acceptability of GMOs
should be decided totally apart from the considerations that will be the primary
focus of this paper. This view on how risk issues should be decided itself implies
both positivist assumptions about the separability of facts and values, on the one
hand, and political assumptions about the role of science in democratic decision
making, on the other. While I am not deeply worried about the environmental risks
of GMOs, I do not share these epistemological and normative assumptions. Thus I
have often found myself in the difficult-to-explain position of agreeing with those
who say that GMOs are not particularly risky when compared to other commonly
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used agricultural technologies, but nonetheless having limited enthusiasm for GMO
technology in virtue of the way that it has been socially institutionalized.
The social institutionalization of agricultural biotechnology is itself complex.
Social institutions situate both agricultural science and practicing farmers within
a matrix of organizations, funding mechanisms and reward systems. The present
shape of these institutions is the product of a century-long evolution that has little
or nothing to do with biotechnology. The discussion that follows highlights three
particularly salient ways in which the new tools for genetic modification of agricultural crops are situated within a matrix of social norms, policy and common
practice. I will begin with a general overview of how agricultural production is itself
subject to peculiarities that give it unique economic characteristics. This will be
followed by a discussion of how regulatory decision making on agricultural technology—including GMOs—has been shaped by economic philosophy in the United
States. Second, the agricultural sciences went through a sequence of evolutionary
changes during the twentieth century that have shaped the way that recombinant
DNA techniques have been deployed and distributed to farmers. Finally, the years
since World War II have seen the emergence of a neo-liberal international political
economy that has dramatically shaped economic events in the developing world.
All of these social processes have profound effects that are of obvious relevance to
the traditional subject matter of social and political philosophy, and as such can be
debated irrespective of GMOs and biotechnology. Yet the techniques that gave us
GMOs have become implicated in these debates in surprising and important ways.
Agricultural Technology and Social Change
Any change in seeds, farm equipment or farming techniques that increases the
productivity of agriculture triggers a cascade of social impacts. Agricultural economists have identified a technology treadmill that begins by lowering the production
cost for farmers who are the first adopters of the new tools and techniques. These
farmers reap significant economic benefits for a period of several years, but as the
technology is widely adopted, the price of agricultural commodities falls to a point
so that return to farmers is very near where it was before the new technology was
used. Farmers are thus running harder (or producing more) to stay in the same
place. But farmers who are late to adopt the technology continue to have production
costs that cannot be supported by the new, lower prices. These farmers tend to fail
economically, and more successful early adopters take over the land. Technological innovation in agriculture thus fuels a social process of exit from farming and
within agriculture, a social structure of fewer and larger farms (Cochrane 1979).
Whether this transition is something to be desired or to be feared has been a
profound question for social philosophy for over a hundred years (Kautsky 1899).
On the one hand, losing one’s farm has a harsh impact on the farmers who exit, and
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The GMO Quandary and What It Means for Social Philosophy
the economic losses are especially painful when those farmers lack the education and
skills for finding new jobs, as well as the social safety net that provides healthcare
and sustenance in the interval of unemployment. The loss of rural population has
further affects on the sustainability of rural communities. Fewer people results in
school consolidation, failure of supply and service businesses and an erosion in the
critical population mass needed to support government, healthcare and financial
service organizations. These effects are amplified at a national scale when upwards
of 80% of the total population are employed in farming, as is the case in many developing countries today. On the other hand, a drop in the price of food has generally
been viewed as socially desirable. Not only does it free income for other types of
consumption, it is especially valuable for poor people who purchase food because
their food budget represents a much larger proportion of total household income.
The basic mechanisms of the treadmill are further complicated by the forms
of land tenure, taxation and credit that happen to be in place within any given
economy. The variability in weather also introduces both uncertainty and inflexibility into food production. In short, farm economies can get badly out of sync with
industrial economies, so that farmers cannot recover costs even as people cannot get
enough to eat. The phrase “breadlines knee deep in wheat” was coined to capture
the policy dilemma of U.S. food policy during the Great Depression. The result in
all developed economies has been a complicated mix of subsidies, incentives, insurance programs, grain reserves, food entitlements and credit schemes. These policy
schemes have so many moving parts that they are very difficult to analyze, and
there is always a cadre of economists who argue for returning to a market system,
even if so-called market systems have left a train of farm bankruptcies, abandoned
rural communities and hungry people in their wake. In summary, there are debates
both about the desirability of greater technical efficiency in agriculture, and about
government interventions in the farm economy that are intended to moderate some
of the cruel effects of market mechanisms.
As I have already intimated, the management of an agricultural economy is
of obvious importance in countries where a significant proportion of the population makes a living from farming. But the basic dilemmas of rural policy and food
production have receded from the consciousness of the general populace in the
industrialized world, where farmers rarely constitute more than 4% of the total
population. In the United States, the figure is now less than 1½ percent. Transition out of farming is no longer a serious social issue in the United States, and the
public’s interest in agriculture—to the extent that there is any interest at all—is
confined to food prices and environmental impact. Nevertheless, the technological
treadmill is still in operation, and the tiny community of farm activists is mindful of it. Early opposition to products of agricultural biotechnology was focused
almost entirely on its predicted impact on small farmers and rural communities.
Indeed, the U.S. dairy industry has in fact seen the marked structural change that
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was predicted to accompany the introduction of recombinant bovine somatotropin
(rBST), an animal drug produced by a genetically engineered bacterium that is also
known as bovine growth hormone. Prior to the introduction of rBST in 1992, a
dairy with 700 cows was considered to be very large, and herds of 15 to 60 cows
were considered viable. Today, large means between 2000 and 10,000 cows, and
the number of commercially viable dairies has plummeted. The shift to fewer and
larger dairies is arguably due more to information technology than to biotechnology,
but farm activists and policy analysts became divided over the new biotechnologies
during the rBST debate (Thompson 2008). The impact of information technology
has been virtually unnoticed, and neither side has seen much reason to change
their view of biotechnology.
The take-home point is that biotechnology became associated with concentration and large-scale farming in the mind of many farm activists. This is a key
aspect of the way that it has been socially institutionalized. Some economists who
have analyzed genetically engineered crops assert that they do not have the kind
of scale bias that would be associated with computerization of record keeping for
dairy cows (Buckwell and Moxey 1990; Jayaraman 2002), but even scale-neutral
technologies are subject to the basic treadmill logic. The larger question for social
philosophy is whether the small-farm bankruptcies and the ensuing concentration
in the farming industry should be regarded as a social problem. This question
could arise in connection with many agricultural inventions of the industrial era—
McCormick’s reaper, tractors powered by steam and then internal combustion
engines, synthetic fertilizers and virtually every incremental advance achieved
through conventional plant breeding. However, many of these innovations occurred
when the economic logic of the treadmill was not well understood (though it was
arguably well articulated in Karl Kautsky’s On the Agrarian Question in 1899).
Even the historical interpretation of when and under what conditions concern
over concentration in agriculture has sparked social opposition is a debatable point
(Gregg 2010). In keeping with the focus on GMOs, it is legitimate to concentrate
on the evolution of regulatory policy for biotechnology, but it is also useful to bear
in mind that the larger social phenomenon might be associated with a much larger
class of agricultural technologies.
Biotechnology Regulation and Neo-Liberal Political Theory
Key U.S. regulatory policy for biotechnology was hashed out in the rBST era, and
a now obscure White House document issued during the first Bush administration set the tone. The occasion for this report was a Congressionally mandated one
year moratorium on the introduction of rBST that was passed following approval
of the drug by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). After a discussion
of the risk-based issues (in the case of rBST these were focused on food safety and
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The GMO Quandary and What It Means for Social Philosophy
animal health) the document moves on to note the social controversy around the
future structure of the dairy industry. The report states that U.S. policy has never
discriminated against a technological innovation on grounds of its social impact
(Executive Office of the President 1994), and this remains the posture that both
Republican and Democratic administrations have supported both domestically
and as their preferred approach in international negotiations.3 The Congressional
moratorium was exceptional, but the general posture of refusing to take action on
a new technology in order to forestall social impact is not.
The argument for this view can be found in the concluding section of John
Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, where he stipulates that losses suffered as a result of
economic completion should not be considered to be harms actionable on the
basis of protecting individual freedom or promoting the social good. Clarifying his
statement that individuals are morally and socially accountable for “such actions as
prejudicial to the interests of others” (Mill 1859, 114). Mill (1806–1873) is quick
to qualify his definition of harm:
Whoever succeeds in an overcrowded profession or in a competitive examination,
whoever is preferred to another in any contest for an object which both desire, reaps
benefit from the loss of others, from their wasted exertion and their disappointment.
But it is, by common admission, better for the general interest of mankind that persons should pursue their objects undeterred by this sort of consequences. In other
words, society admits no right, either legal or moral, in the disappointed competitors
to immunity from this kind of suffering, and feels called on to interfere only when
means of success have been employed which it is contrary to the general interest to
permit—namely, fraud or treachery and force. (Mill 1859, 115)
Mill goes on to note that while governments were once expected to fix prices, a
doctrine of “free trade” is now recognized to rest “on grounds different from, though
equally solid with, the principle of individual liberty asserted in this essay” (ibid.).
The view that governments should not manipulate policy in order to achieve
a desired social outcome has become a mainstay of social policies advocated by
Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) and Milton Friedman (1912–2006). Here the view is
that competitive markets achieve desirable social outcomes because they coordinate
information that is widely dispersed throughout society. No centralized decision
maker is in a position to know what everyone wants, or all the ways in which in a
given good might be viewed as useful to some purpose. Hence government intervention in a functioning market inevitably produces a worse social outcome than simply
allowing market forces to operate (Hayek 1944; Friedman and Friedman 1962).
Applied to the treadmill phenomenon, Mills’s view implies that those farmers who
lose their farms have no basis—no right—on which to claim that they have suffered an actionable harm. But his view might not preclude social action to preserve
small farms on some other utilitarian ground. The neoliberal views of Hayek and
Friedman, however, appear to suggest that since the concentration in agriculture is
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the result of a market process, there can be no basis for social intervention to deter
or alter this result. Such would seem to have been the view of the authors of the
George H. W. Bush Administration report on the social impact of rBST.
Even if one accepts the neoliberal view as an approach to economic policy in
general (and I do not), it is highly questionable as to whether it should be applied
to those policies that shape processes of technological innovation. I will state two
arguments for this in passing, though I cannot offer a fully formed defense of them.
First, technological innovation is responsive to market incentives in exceedingly
untidy ways. The innovation most fundamental to modern industrial agriculture is
the Haber-Bosch process, which is crucial to the production of synthetic fertilizer.
However, the capacity to produce synthetic fertilizer on a scale useful to agriculture
occurred as a side-effect of the massive scale-up for producing explosives for World
War I. Similarly, the industrial capability to produce chemical pesticides such as
DDT was the result of command decisions made in World War II (Russell 2001).
These technologies might not have been successful competitors for more management-intensive technologies like composting and biological control (technologies
emblematic of organic farming today) were it not for massive public subsidies that
created the industrial infrastructure for their production during the two World Wars.
Furthermore, these two technologies have put agriculture on a social trajectory that
has proven difficult to reverse. The current generation of industrial farmers lacks
the patience and skill to employ management-oriented technologies that, by some
standards, are more sustainable on both social and environmental grounds. It is thus
highly questionable as to whether we can interpret the current size-distribution of
farms in American agriculture as the result of a true market mechanism.
Second and more generally, neoliberalism can be distinguished from nineteenth-century laissez faire by the recognition that government has the responsibility
to create a consistent legal structure of police power, contract law and property
rights. The arguments of Hayek and Friedman acknowledge that the details of this
structure have profound effects on the exchanges that rational economic agents are
willing to make. If one can alienate the mineral rights from one’s land holdings,
for example, a series of economic exchanges ensue that would never occur if they
are inseparable from surface use rights. Neo-liberals recognize the need to settle
the precise specification of property rights through political and philosophical
debate, and differ among themselves as to what principles are most crucial. They
hold that once these questions are settled, market forces can begin to operate and
that governments risk havoc when they intervene in functioning markets. At this
juncture, society should generally regard the attempt to change property rights as
a form of interference in the market, because rational decision making requires
consistent rules. Virtually all neoliberals would have agreed that widespread farm
bankruptcy provides no legitimate basis for government action.
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The GMO Quandary and What It Means for Social Philosophy
But technological innovation has the ability to take the definition of property
rights out of the public sphere in certain key cases, and to destabilize markets as a
result. Biotechnology is a case in point. The technological ability to engineer seeds
has effectively allowed firms that control this technology to alienate traits from
plants that would hitherto have been physically embedded in seeds. Previously, one
could not buy or sell the trait without buying or selling seeds. Plant biotechnology
has thus thoroughly changed the social institutions of seed exchange, and we have
not had the debate to sanction this change. Biotechnology has arguably resulted
in a ‘taking’ of farmers’ property rights previously associated with the control and
exchange of seed and introduced an entirely new set of institutions for the control
and exchange of biological traits. There was no opportunity for political decisions
about how these institutions should be socially organized. It is thus logically inconsistent to hold that the outcome of economic transactions that follow from these
transformations is immune from critique, even on neoliberal grounds (Thompson
2007a and 2007b).
Biotechnology and the Philosophy of Agricultural Science
Historians of agriculture and agricultural science are beginning to identify a number
of distinct themes that have been contested among farmers, agricultural scientists
and the developers or manufacturers of farm technology. At the present moment,
a key division can be recognized between those who see agriculture’s top priority
in terms of “feeding the world” and those who believe that agriculture must be
renewable, regenerative or resilient. Everyone recognizes that when viewed on a
global scale, the aggregate total of farming practices must be attentive both to its
capacity for producing an adequate amount of food and to its environmental base,
yet there is a subtle but profound and deep difference of opinion between those
who prioritize one of these goals over the other. At bottom, this debate has nothing
to do with biotechnology. One can imagine forms of agriculture in which all the
tools of genetic engineering and plant transformation are deployed in service to a
vision that is committed to environmental sustainability. The molecular biologist
Pamela Ronald has attracted some attention for her advocacy of such an approach
to biotechnology, for example (Ronald and Adamchak 2008). But the social reality
is much simpler. Biotechnology has been captured by the “feed the world” perspective, and many of the people on the other side of this debate have come to regard
it as the enemy.
It will be useful to sketch the philosophical dispute a bit more carefully,
though it will prove impossible to do justice to it in a few paragraphs. My aim
here is to explain why GMOs have come to take on demonic significance among
the advocates of sustainable agriculture by placing the emergence of agricultural
biotechnology within a longer trajectory in agricultural science. The environmental
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historian Frank Uekotter has identified one source of the rift among German soil
scientists in the 1930s. A debate ensued between advocates of synthetic fertilizer,
on the one hand, and soil ecologists who were concerned about its effect on soil
organisms and long-term soil health. In this particular case, the ecologists lost, and
Uekotter identifies three interconnected reasons. There was firstly a straightforward
scientific controversy over the factors contributing to plant growth. Justus von
Liebig (1803–1873) had promulgated a doctrine emphasizing just three chemicals: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. A reductive interpretation of Liebig’s
view was advocated by those pushing synthetic fertilizer, which held that only
these components mattered and that their source was irrelevant. The ecologists
had a much less coherent and convincing story. Second, while the group favoring
synthetic nitrogen had Liebig’s still influential reputation to support their cause,
the soil ecologists hitched their wagon to some declining stars. In particular, they
aligned with advocates of vitalism that included Hans Driesch (1867–1941), and
that took an anti-Darwinist turn in the work of German biologists such as Jakob
von Uexküll (1864–1944). This is not where biology was headed in the 1930s,
and the choice resulted in a substantial loss of prestige for the ecological point of
view. Finally and most decisively according to Uekotter, synthetic fertilizers were
easy for farmers to use, and they produced immediate and visible improvements
in farm productivity. With the exception of a few eccentrics, the farm community
abandoned the ecological perspective (Uekotter 2010).
The American environmental historian Steven Stoll identifies an earlier origin for this bifurcation of perspectives on agriculture, citing an argument among
American farmers that emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The
Louisiana Purchase and the U.S. Government’s persecution of Native American tribes
in the West opened up the possibility for a style of farming that had a notoriously
short horizon of sustainability. Known as skimming, the idea was to move onto
fertile land, farm it aggressively and then move on when a combination of declining
soil nutrients and erosion robbed the land of its ability to produce viable crops. Stoll
notes that this profit-maximizing mentality was countered by Eastern farmers and
farm writers who advocated well-known but difficult-to-practice ways to conserve
soil fertility by rotating crops and carefully shifting one’s farming practices. This
was almost always less productive over the short run, and the above-mentioned
technology treadmill tended to ensure that many farmers who tried to practice
soil conservation were poor competitors to their more extractive neighbors. Importantly, the advocates of conservation farming were not particularly interested
in the environmental consequences of agriculture. Their advocacy was based on
the need to develop and maintain socially sustainable rural communities. It was
the depopulation of rural areas after skimming that provoked their concern, but
Stoll nonetheless sees the writers who advocated the ecologically oriented message
as progenitors of an ecologically-oriented approach in our own time (Stoll 2003).
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The GMO Quandary and What It Means for Social Philosophy
I cite these examples to illustrate how historians of agriculture are tracing the
emergence of an environmental sustainability perspective. The rise of an opposing
point of view fixated on the need to feed the world may have been more obvious and
more influential. The work of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) is, of course, crucial
to a national or global perspective on this imperative. Synthetic fertilizer and the
Haber-Bosch process is one key episode in the history of agricultural science (Smil
2004), while plant breeding success with hybrid corn and with Green Revolution
wheat and rice varieties is another (Fitzgerald 1997). All of these techniques have
allowed farmers to realize steady increases in yields that have defied Malthus’s
prediction that population would outpace food production. Significantly, hybrid
corn and Green Revolution rice are genetic technologies, albeit not ones that involve
genetic engineering. Yet in both cases, plants are genetically modified in ways that
increase their potential for greater yields.
A great deal of recent enthusiasm for even more feed-the-world agricultural
technology may have its roots in such staple sources of environmentalism as Paul
and Anne Erlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and The Club of Rome’s The Limits
to Growth (Meadows, Randers, and Behrens 1972). These books, with others, created a sense of impending crisis owing to accelerating human population growth
and foreseeable limits to the Earth’s carrying capacity. While these authors may
not have intended it, the response to these books among agricultural scientists has
been to create an all-purpose rationale for new technologies that allow farmers to
produce more from the same land base. Among farmers themselves, the rhetoric
of feeding the world has provided a way to silence critics who raise concerns
about the environmental impact of industrial monoculture. I will not examine the
arguments or choose sides between the world-feeders and the sustainability types
in the present context. My purpose here is more narrowly confined to illustrating
how this division within the farming community and the agricultural sciences has
become embroiled in one of the most enduring dimensions of the GMO quandary.
The point can be made succinctly. By the time that techniques of biotechnology were emerging in agricultural universities and government research stations in
the early 1980s, these organizations were dominated by advocates of the feed-theworld perspective. Exactly how this happened is a longer story, though Uekotter’s
account of German soil science provides a case study that can be generalized by
anyone with sufficient imagination. In the meantime, however, a rump group of
farmers and ranchers were beginning to match up with food consumers and chefs
who were profoundly dissatisfied with the safety and nutrition of industrially produced food, not to mention the taste and quality of industrial commodities. Almost
entirely without assistance from agricultural researchers, state and national extension
services and the respective ministries of agriculture, this rump group was forming
into the social movement that would eventually give rise to organic standards, farmers’ markets, slow food and restaurants specializing in artisanally produced meats,
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cheeses and fresh vegetables (Guthman 2004). The fact that this social movement
survived several decades of absolutely no support from agricultural research and
extension, as well as policies that were inimical to their goals created the sense that
agricultural science was, in fact, the enemy. Agricultural universities, government
research labs and the major farm input companies came to be viewed with suspicion.
It is likely that anything coming out of universities and agribusiness firms
would have been the target of resistance and activism by this emerging social movement. What is more, many public administrators of agricultural programs were so
enamored with feed-the-world genetic improvement mentality in the 1980s and
1990s that they rebuffed calls to initiate more programming in sustainable agriculture at the USDA and public universities. They needed new faculty lines and
laboratory space for a generation of molecular biologists, and they tended to get
these resources from retirements by soil scientists or bio-control specialists who
might have spoken up for a more sustainable alternative. Meanwhile in the private
sector, biotechnology companies went on a spree of purchasing seed companies
and small supply companies that might have been willing to service an alternative
agriculture market. From the larger perspective of social philosophy, this battle for
power in agricultural institutions must look like a tempest in a teapot, but it was
very real nonetheless. It split the farm sector into a house divided against itself, and
one divided along lines of David and Goliath, to boot.
Biotechnology and Neoliberal Globalization
The picture I have just drawn above is very much an agricultural insider’s perspective, and it is in certain respects confined to the United States. Genetically engineered
crops were presented to a European audience at a time when American farmers
coveted greater opportunity to sell commodities in world markets, and European
farmers had every reason to search for rationales that would protect their markets
both at home and abroad. In this kind of political context, it is very easy to use the
standard epistemic arguments for creating doubts about safety as a way to garner
public support for policies that could be regarded as protectionist. This is too simple
a reading of the European opposition to GMOs. Europe was also reeling from bad
scientific assessments of risk in connection with both the Chernobyl accident and
more pedestrian environmental contamination in formerly socialist countries. The
process of harmonizing food safety regulations was tripped up by a number of food
scares, the most serious of which was the handling of mad cow disease in Great
Britain. There are many reasons why the epistemic doubts might have been more
persuasive in Europe than they were in North America, and they took form in the
call to make science-based regulatory decision more responsive to a democratic
process. It is clear, however, that European resistance gave new impetus to those
who still had doubts in the U.S., and the result was a global controversy in which
the epistemic and social issues are thoroughly intermixed.
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The GMO Quandary and What It Means for Social Philosophy
I have used the term ‘neo-liberalism’ already in my analysis, but Americans in
general are unlikely to use this word to describe social or political philosophies. It
is very different outside the United States, where neoliberal philosophy is strongly
associated with processes of globalization. As I have already indicated, I associate
neoliberalism with a view that defines government’s role in terms of the need to
establish the institutional framework in which market transactions and capital investments will operate. This was the self-consciously formulated position that led
to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which became the World Trade Organization
(WTO) in 1995. Strictly speaking, a neoliberal sees no role for government beyond
this function because a smoothly functioning global economic system is supposed
to render war obsolete, but I would stress that there is still a role for politics and
political philosophy in the neoliberal vision because envisioning and specifying the
rules for investment and exchange is not a trivial affair. The libertarian neoliberal is
going to emphasize personal freedoms and will view institutions that permit multinational corporations to flourish at the expense of personal safety and individual
entrepreneurship somewhat askance. Utilitarian neoliberals will be impressed by
configurations of property rights that promote economic growth, and may be willing to countenance a certain amount of damage to health and liberty in exchange.4
Neoliberal visions are opposed by conventional liberals, who still think that
it is possible to take a neutral stance toward competing visions of the good, and
by a ragtag collection of communitarians, radicals and revolutionaries, who agree
on little beyond the impossibility of making a coherent distinction between the
economic and social sphere. Both neo and conventional liberals were chastened
by the failure of structural adjustment policies imposed upon developing countries in the 1980s that were supposed to hasten an era of capital investment and
economic growth.5 Certainly there are still neoliberals who think that the trouble
with structural adjustment was that it did not go far enough, but outside the United
States and even among American sociologists and geographers, neoliberalism is
both a discredited political philosophy and an ideology foisted on the rest of the
world by American investors who care only about corporate profits, and by a series of American governments that care only about placating American investors.
I paint the picture too broadly, of course, but my purpose is only to set the stage
for considering what role agricultural biotechnology could have in the expansion
of global markets and American economic power that is rightly or wrongly tied to
the critique of neoliberalism.
The most obvious connection is TRIPs, the Agreement on Trade-Related
Intellectual Property that is a codicil of WTO. Here, the goal has been to get developing countries and especially the Chinese to recognize patents and copyright.
The TRIPs agreement has been a priority for American publishing, filmmaking and
music industries and for American drug companies. Developing countries have
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long ignored drug patents, and drug manufacturers have made patented medicines
available in poor countries at a fraction of the cost paid by developed world consumers. Since drug companies are biotechnology companies there is a direct tie, and
since the TRIPs agreement would also apply to GMO patents, there is an indirect
one, as well. Most significantly the Biotechnology Industrial Organization (BIO),
which represents both agricultural and pharmaceutical biotechnology companies,
has been very active in lobbying for stronger IP agreements. But it is important to
recognize that it is the larger and more lucrative pharmaceutical side of BIO that
is driving things here.6 TRIPs is, nonetheless, symbolically important because it is
easy to understand the interests at stake.
The Sanitary and Phyto-Santitary (SPS) Agreement of the World Trade Organization is more important at a substantive level. The SPS Agreement prevents
countries from regulating the importation of a product on environmental or safety
grounds unless they can produce a scientific risk assessment to show that the product poses a risk to the people or the environment of the importing country. Even
if the product poses environmental or safety risk outside the importing country,
say to ecosystems or workers where it is produced, this cannot be the basis of any
restriction on importation according to the SPS. This means that the SPS agreement
outlaws the kind of action where environmentalists in Europe or the US who are
trying to preserve Brazilian rainforest would lobby to restrict importation of wood
or meat that is implicated in habitat loss in Brazil. Members of WTO cannot enact
such a measure without exposing themselves to a trade action. As applied to GMOs,
the SPS agreement means that countries cannot refuse import of a GMO because
one fears that it will have a negative impact on biodiversity in the country where it
was grown. In the view of some GMO opponents, this puts the SPS agreement in
direct conflict with a component of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) which
requires signatories to engage in cooperative action to protect biodiversity. The
Cartagena Protocol was developed to address biodiversity threats associated with
“Living Modified Organisms,” which are defined as organisms that are the product of
modern biotechnology (Stoll 2000; Brand and Görg 2003). The question of whether
a particular GMO actually is a threat to biodiversity plunges the debate right back
into the epistemological and risk-based questions that I have tried to circumvent in
this paper. But notice that if one takes a consistently skeptical stance with respect to
the philosophical controversies that animate the epistemological debates, one can
develop a position that supports a strong prejudice against GMOs in accordance
with the terms of the Cartagena Protocol. I might note that doing so requires one
to take epistemological views quite reminiscent of those taken by skeptics of global
climate change, but this is the kind of observation that makes me quite unpopular
among people with whom I would like to remain friends.
The United States, of course, is not a signatory to the Convention on Biological
Diversity or the Cartegena Protocol, and objections from BIO were material to the
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The GMO Quandary and What It Means for Social Philosophy
U.S. decision not to participate (McAfee 2003). So it is quite plausible to see the U.S.
posture as one of supporting profits over biodiversity in this instance. One might also
add that unlike U.S. farmers, developing country farmers seldom purchase seeds.
They either save or trade seed among themselves, or rely on free distribution of
seeds from international development agencies. What is more, GMO seeds are now
covered by a technology license that farmers must sign at the time of purchase. It is
not difficult to construct a storyline which sees GMO technology—putatively being
developed to feed the world—as a Trojan horse for a market infrastructure that
would allow seed companies (which are increasingly also biotechnology companies)
to operate profitably in a developing country context. Biotechnology companies
are not even particularly coy about this point. From their perspective, this would
be a good thing for them and for farmers alike. The fact that American farmers do
buy their seed (and sign their technology licenses) is, for them, proof of the fact.
From here the storyline starts to loop back to the technology treadmill, this
time focused on economies where 80 percent of the people are poor farmers who
lack education, alternative employment and a social safety net. Biotechnology is
seen as part of a conspiracy to deprive poor farmers in the developing world of
their already tenuous land rights. Better capitalized firms await the bankruptcy of
farmers unversed in the developed world institutions of seed markets, technology
contracts and debt financing. They are poised to step in when productivity increases
and prices fall, scooping up the lands of all but those few farmers who are savvy
enough to shift rapidly to a Western set of institutions for financing and marketing
agricultural production. The picture becomes even more bleak when one notices that
many of the most lucrative applications of biotechnology are now being focused on
animal feeds and non-food crops like biofuels. Much of the land taken from poor
farmers will not actually be used to “feed the world.” Some of it will instead feed
those rich enough to buy animal protein and the rest will go to fuel their SUVs. But
what is one to do about this in a world where socio-economic consequences have
been excluded from decision making about technological innovation?
It is at this point that using unjustifiably skeptical epistemological assumptions
in order to stoke the fears of unsuspecting food consumers starts to look justifiable
on social and political grounds. After all, the neoliberals have deprived social activists
of using more straightforwardly democratic means to shape the application of new
agricultural technology. Regulatory tools that focus on food safety and environmental risk are the only means left to even slow the potentially devastating social
and economic consequences of farmer bankruptcy and dispossession. Given the
political realities that poor people currently face, it would be ethically irresponsible
not to use the only means at one’s disposal for affecting political resistance. What
is more, the fact that agricultural scientists and biotechnology companies seem
blithely willing to simply ignore the fate of the poor, can we even trust their motives
in making the appropriate epistemological assumptions? Are they not blinded by
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profits and the sources that fund their research? Can we even believe the assurances
of safety that come from nominally neutral bodies, such as the National Research
Council? I have called the loop that connects political and epistemological issues
a hybridizing view of risk and it is at this juncture that I find myself on opposite
sides of the issue with my scientific friends who think that facts and values can be
purified into separate realms where science and democracy never mix.7
In connecting the dots between neoliberal policies and the global promotion
of American economic interests, on the one hand, and the promotion of GMO
seeds outside the borders of the United States, on the other, I have tried to convey
the sense of outrage with which many opponents of biotechnology have come to
view the issues. I have not tried to convey a politically neutral assessment of the
international agreements that are associated with globalization, though certainly
there are philosophical interpretations of WTO, TRIPS, and the SPS agreement that
would present a much more favorable picture of the intentions behind them. My
point is this: Whether the types of policy associated with the neo-liberal perspective are philosophically justified or not, GMOs have come to occupy center stage
in the world view of many people who are united in their opposition to them.
This narrative has come to be an important component of the way that GMOs are
socially institutionalized, especially outside the United States. It is difficult to see
how future applications of biotechnology in the food system will escape the outrage and resistance of the millions who have come to associate meaning with the
acronym ‘GMO’ in this manner.
Concluding Remarks
I have sketched three ways in which genetically engineered crops—so-called
GMOs—have become socially institutionalized since their introduction in the waning years of the second millennium. All of them are problematic from the perspective
of social philosophy, though none of them seize upon anything that is biologically
or scientifically unique to the use of recombinant DNA technology. First, GMOs
are a particularly visible form of yield-increasing agricultural technology, and yieldincreasing technologies have been associated with economic concentration in the
farming sector for a very long time. If concentration is socially problematic, GMOs
will be problematic, though there is truly no reason to see products of biotechnology as more problematic than the use of computers, GPS or any number of other
tools that drive the technology treadmill toward fewer and larger farms.
Next, GMO science is simply the next wave in a trend toward more reductive,
lab-based approaches that emphasize plant genetics and purchased inputs. The
dominance of this trend has pushed soil ecology, management intensive and onfarm research to the margins in many agricultural research institutions. Meanwhile,
a farmer organized social movement emphasizing composting, complex crop mixes,
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The GMO Quandary and What It Means for Social Philosophy
organic certification and direct to consumer marketing has emerged as a culturally significant (if still economically minor) competitor to conventional methods.
There is a rift between this social movement and the universities and government
laboratories that have traditionally provided support services to agriculture. One’s
attitude to GMO crops is the badge of allegiance that one displays in choosing sides.
Finally, GMOs are, again, symbolically important within an even larger ongoing debate over the relationship between government power and the shape of the
global economy. The view that government must build the institutions that enable
trade, but must stay out of everything else, has been ascendant at least since the
creation of the Bretton Woods institutions following World War II. The transition
from GATT to WTO began in 1995, and the first large scale plantings of GMO
crops occurred in 1997. It was, perhaps, inevitable that some product or technology would be the focus of disagreement and debate as WTO provisions began to
be implemented, and followers of GATT would not have been surprised to learn
that agricultural commodities would rise to the forefront. From this perspective,
GMOs were simply handy. At the same time, scholars have argued that science
itself was politicized by this process, as the “science-based assessment” became the
standard for deciding how disputes under the new WTO rules were to be adjudicated (Kinchy, Kleinman, and Autry 2008).
Only the first of these institutions is strongly associated with a policy decision. The United States has resolutely refused to act in order to address or direct
the social consequences of technical change. I have argued that although this stance
may seem to accord with both liberal and especially neoliberal philosophies, such
a conclusion requires that we do not look too hard at the way technological innovations unilaterally alter the system of property rights that undergird capitalist
economies, effectively vitiating the legitimacy of the market-outcome justification
for non-interference. I am also characterizing the alignment of agricultural science
with genetics-based industrial monocultures and the demonization of GMOs by a
social movement resisting neoliberal globalization as forms of social institutionalization. Certainly in the latter case there are international agreements that provide
a focus for policy disagreement, but both cases reflect the forces of culture and
the outcomes of communication far more than they reflect any identifiable governmental action. This does not, in my view, make them any less real or any less
potent as forces affecting the trajectory of future agricultural products derived from
molecular manipulation.
I remain committed to the view that farmers, and especially poor farmers,
actually do need better technology, though I believe that better technology will
require a stronger commitment to renewability, regeneration and resilience that
we have seen in the past. An elegant (though lengthy) argument for this claim has
been assembled by Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, who do not mention
genetically engineered crops. Succinctly, their argument claims that developing
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country farmers do need to improve the technological productivity of their farming methods if they ever hope to escape a grinding kind of poverty (Mazoyer and
Roudart 2006). This claim contradicts critics of the Green Revolution who imply
that peasant farmers were just fine before Western agricultural science intervened.
It is because I find the argument of Mazoyer and Roudart convincing that I would
sign on to a project that some have called the “sustainable intensification of agriculture” (Garnett et al. 2013), but the argument for this must await another forum.
There is no scientific reason why the tools of molecular biology could not make
a substantial contribution to sustainable agriculture, but the social institutionalization of biotechnology has created a quandary that has made such a contribution
unlikely in present circumstances. The analysis given above will provide social
philosophers the opportunity to weigh in on each of the three ways in which institutionalization becomes salient for one’s view on GMOs. My own view on the
first controversy is that that there is more space for debate over the social consequences of technological innovation than the received view suggests. I regard the
second controversy over the informal configuration of attitudes within agriculture
as an empirically contingent situation rather than a philosophically necessary one.
I continue to hope that more nuanced and informed contributions from social
philosophers will improve the chances for convergence of the world-feeding and
sustainable agriculture perspectives. With respect to globalization I am confident
that the United States has committed to extreme positions that should not be
supported, but I am equally sure that the bile directed toward biotechnology will
result in the failure to adopt genetic technologies that would be quite beneficial to
the poor. I am quite undecided as to how general social policy on global trade and
technology transfer should be configured.
Michigan State University
Notes
1. The original source for wicked problems is Rittel and Webber 1973.
2. The background material on genetic engineering in agriculture discussed throughout is
drawn from my 2007 book. I might note that I am NOT the author of R. Paul Thompson,
Agro-Technology: A Philosophical Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011).
3. See Thompson 2007a. The incident is also discussed at more length in Thompson
1997.
4. For a discussion of libertarian vs. utilitarian neo-liberalism, see D. F. B Tucker 1994.
I thank Larry Busch for bringing this source to my attention.
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The GMO Quandary and What It Means for Social Philosophy
5. For a discussion of how structural adjustment affected views on agricultural technology
in the context of international development, see Luis Camacho 2008.
6. Negotiating the tangle of legal, policy and political documents involving the World Trade
Organization is a wicked problem in and of itself. In preparing this paper for publication
I used an electronic search engine to review key publications regarding the TRIPS agreement. I was surprised to discover that papers linking TRIPS to agricultural biotechnology
dominate the highest rankings. This is not in itself any indication of whether it is property
rights in agriculture, pharmaceuticals or digital media that represents the most important
economic driver for globalization of patent, copyright and other IP regimes, only that GMO
disputes are among the most newsworthy. I remain convinced that an actor-network study
of TRIPS that followed the actors (instead of the commentators) would wind up in the
corporate offices of drug and media companies rather than the corporations that develop
and market GMOs. However, on reflection I believe that the analysis given in this paper
does indeed underplay the significance of gene patents in the GMO quandary. It is clear
that major agricultural biotechnology firms rely on TRIPS to establish and enforce claims
on their property rights in GMO plant varieties outside the United States, Europe and a
few other industrialized countries. Yet it is also true (as I discuss in Food Biotechnology
in Ethical Perspective) that the issues cannot be reduced to any single legal instrument for
protecting intellectual property, be it patents or TRIPS. This is, in short, another of several
areas where the constraints of single journal article are simply too confining for an adequate
portrayal of the key issues. For more thorough discussion see Carolyn Deere 2009.
7. In addition to my works cited above, see Thompson 2012 for an extension of this
argument to synthetic biology and biofuels.
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