Environmental Politics, Vol. 14, No. 3, 309 – 323, June 2005

The Environmental and PostEnvironmental Politics of Genetically Modified Crops and Foods FREDERICK H. BUTTEL Department of Rural Sociology and Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

ABSTRACT The movement against genetically modified (GM) crops/foods has become progressively ‘environmentalised’ in recent years, but making environmental risk the focus of the movement’s critique of GM crops is probably, for activists, a strategic mistake, for the issue is not self-evidently simply an environmental one. When anti-GM activists, proGM interests, and policy makers refer to ‘GM crops and foods’, they are not always referring to the same thing. Terms like GM, genetic engineering, biotechnology, transgenics, molecular biology, and basic research are used interchangeably, even though they mean quite different things. Some rethinking of the meaning of GM and of sustainability, combined with recent developments in the biological sciences, offers potential for alliances between scientists and activists in efforts to move away from GM crops and toward sustainable agriculture.

The movement against genetically modified (GM) crops and foods is of widespread interest and concern among scholars and activists alike. While the issues at stake in and for this movement seem quite straightforward, there are critical nuances to GM politics that are not adequately understood. In the following pages, I take up two issues. First, I explore the ‘environmentalisation’ of the anti-GM foods/crops movement and explore the strategic implications of this framing. Second, I discuss how some rethinking about the meaning of genetic modification and sustainability combined with recent developments in biological science create the possibility of alliances between activists and scientists that could permit us to move beyond GM crops.

Frederick H. Buttel was William H. Sewell Professor of Rural Sociology and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Fred, who was a tireless campaigner for environmental sociology and a greatly respected member of the environmental studies community, died on 14 January 2005 after an extended battle with cancer. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 2004. Daniel Kleinman ([email protected]) assisted with revisions. ISSN 0964-4016 Print/1744-8934 Online/05/030309–15 ª 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/09644010500151602

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There is the presumption among many movement observers that the GM foods and crops question is fundamentally an environmental/risk issue, broadly construed (to include extant environmental impacts, precautionary policy making, and human health and safety implications). Although environmental issues were a significant area of concern in movement organisations prior to the 1990s, by that time the GM issue was ‘environmentalised’, and this largely remains the case up to the present. That is, GM crop and food issues became constructed largely in terms of the environmental implications and risks of the technology, and the frames, discourses, and claims became increasingly centred on environmental and risk arguments. Simultaneously, the global environmental movement became more or less uniformly anti-GM.1 In the pages that follow, I devote particular attention to the significance of the 1990s ‘environmentalisation’ (Buttel, 1992) of the anti-GM movement in the North and of its implications for the movement’s long-term future. From a discussion of the environmentalised anti-GM movement, I turn my attention to how the anti-GM movement might make alliances with agricultural scientists. Here, I consider the different ways in which the antiGM movement and plant scientists think about genetic engineering and sustainable agriculture. I suggest that if anti-GM activists are to build alliances with plant scientists they will need to understand and take seriously the structure of incentives that these scientists face. The Anti-GM Movement: A Necessary Definitional Prolegomenon What is it that we mean when we speak of genetic modification? ‘GM’ is, of course, the acronym for ‘genetically modified’ crops and/or foods.2 At one level, it is quite clear what GM crops and foods pertain to. For the first decade of GM commercialisation, there have been two main types of GM crops, which together account for over 99% of global GM crop hectares (James, 2003). The first type consists of crops that have been rendered insect-resistant through the incorporation of novel genes (generally from the soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, or ‘Bt’) that code for an insect toxin. These are widely referred to as ‘Bt crops’. The second main type is those that have been rendered herbicideresistant (HR) as a result of the insertion of novel genes that code for resistance to the toxic effects of a herbicide (most often, Roundup or Liberty herbicides). These are generally referred to as ‘HR crops’ (or sometimes as herbicidetolerant or ‘HT’ crops). In addition, there are various ‘stacked’ GM crop varieties that involve either a combination of insect and herbicide resistance, or a combination of different types of insect resistance (e.g. resistance to both European corn borer and corn rootworm, two of the most significant insect pests of corn in the US). For all practical purposes, the two GM crops that currently exist involve single-gene input traits – that is, they affect farmers’ input mixes and practices, rather than being aimed at enhancing the quality or type of output. These two major GM crop types have been most successfully

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applied to crops that are mainly used as industrial raw materials and animal feeds: soybeans, corn, cotton, and canola.3 The two most important GM crop types, while they have some common characteristics, have diverse track records – sometimes having to do with the particular GM characteristic and its biology or the local agricultural ecosystem, and in other instances having to do with the social character of the agro-food system. Far and away the most successful product has been HR soybeans, mainly because the technology is highly dependable (in that HR soybeans are reliably resistant to Roundup) and is highly compatible with ‘notill’ husbandry practices, which involve planting into the stubble from the previous year’s harvest in order to reduce soil erosion, save tillage trips over fields, and save labour. No-till has previously been limited by the fact that ‘drilled’ seedbeds (i.e. those planted in very narrow rows, 6 inches (15 centimetres) or so in width) that are planted into the previous year’s crop residue cannot be mechanically cultivated, and herbicide use is mandatory. There have been very few herbicides that can work effectively ‘post-emergence’. But, most fundamentally, no-till is a mechanisation technology; farmers adopt it to reduce labour inputs and to be able to farm larger acreages of crops such as corn and soybeans. HR soybeans have thus substantially removed many of the farm management barriers to large-scale cultivation of soybeans. The ability of farmers to substantially increase the scale of soybean production has a powerful logic in a sector in which economic margins are being squeezed (due, among other things, to impressive expansion of production in Brazil and Argentina), despite massive subsidies to US soy producers. The technology is widely applicable across space; it can be used in soybean production almost anywhere except the humid tropics. Bt cotton has been somewhat less successful globally, but it dominates the US cotton market and has a modestly growing international adoption rate. Both Bt corn and Bt cotton are dogged by two interrelated problems, however. First, many ecologists and entomologists (e.g. Gould, 1998) believe that the biology of Bt crops makes it likely that insect resistance will develop even earlier than would be the case with synthetic chemical pesticides. There are particular concerns that because of the role played by Bt in agricultural and non-agricultural ecosystems, insect resistance to Bt toxins could become a major ecological problem and, in addition, undermine organic farming, which depends heavily on applications of naturally occurring Bt (Jenkins, 1998). Second, in much of the world in which Bt crops are grown, farmers are expected to employ ‘insect resistance management’ practices (chiefly, growing a 20% refuge of non-Bt corn or cotton) in order to delay the onset of insect resistance. Thus, whereas HR soybeans serve to reduce the management barriers to large-scale, mechanised cultivation of soybeans, Bt crop technology involves mandatory management practices that interfere with unfettered mechanisation. Private and public researchers have for some time been working on other GM-type crops (by which I mean crops that have been ‘genetically engineered’

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to incorporate novel single-gene traits in their genomes), but insect resistance and herbicide resistance will probably be the last blockbuster GM traits (in the sense of being single-gene input-trait product types of the scope of Bt and HR crops) to be identified and commercialised. In practical terms, then, the bulk of the activist action in the world of GM crops pertains to contesting Bt, HR, and ‘stacked’ crops. The day-to-day work of anti-GM activist groups is aimed at curbing the scope of research and development (R&D), regulatory approvals, production, marketing, trade, and consumption as they relate to insect- and herbicide-resistant crops (Tokar, 2001; Schurman & Munro, 2003). There is, however, another extremely important component of debates over ‘plant biotechnology’, ‘genetic engineering’, and transgenic technology which is of tremendous importance in the anti-GM struggle and which has little public recognition. There has been a general tendency for both anti-GM activists and pro-GM groups intentionally or inadvertently to use the GM category broadly – far more broadly than my definition of single-gene input traits employing novel or exotic genes. Both anti-GM activists and pro-GM interests tend to use the expressions GM, ‘genetic engineering’ (GE), ‘biotechnology’, and molecular biology loosely and often quite interchangeably. Anti-GM activists and pro-GM interests do so, of course, for entirely different reasons. Anti-GM activists are motivated by the general conviction that the genetic manipulation that molecular biology makes possible is either bad (unethical, risky, unnecessary) in its own right (e.g. McKibben, 2003), or attracts unwarranted levels of funding and attention that would otherwise go to socially desirable or progressive research (sustainable agriculture, organic farming, farmer-driven research) (Kloppenburg, 2005). This posture is manifest in activists’ apparently growing tendency to refer to the two main GM crop types discussed above as ‘genetically engineered’ (or GE) crops, rather than GM crops. Among the reasons for this seems to be the desire to stigmatise all direct transfers of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in plant improvement regardless of whether the genes in these transfers come from the same species or a distantly related one. Pro-GM interests routinely appear to mix and confuse the GM, GE, ‘biotechnology’, and molecular biology categories for two different but interrelated reasons. First, these groups appear to believe that if GM crops are linked technically with existing and promising new developments in biomedical and health-related ‘biotechnology’, this will serve to make anti-GM activists appear hypocritical if they do not oppose biomedical biotechnology as well. Second, pro-GM groups strive to link GM with basic, fundamental, or cutting-edge research, and thus imply that opposition to GM involves turning our backs on promising developments in basic research (Kleinman & Kinchy, 2003). This strategy has been very successful in leading a large number of public agricultural scientists to view anti-GM activism negatively. In order to be able to understand how anti-GM activists might collaborate with plant scientists (something I consider in the conclusion), it is important

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to recognise that GM techniques, technologies, and products are one very particular instance of the application of ‘biotechnology’, molecular biology, and transgenic methods to plant agriculture. Put somewhat differently, much of what contemporary plant molecular biologists actually do does not revolve around developing new single-gene input-trait products using novel genes from distantly related species. Just as one example, there are hundreds of public researchers worldwide who are using the tools of functional genomics, computational genomics, quantitative trait locus analysis, and markerassisted selection to identify useful variation within particular plant species, and to manipulate crop genomes in order to make use of this intraspecific variation (Tanksley & McCouch, 1997; Strauss, 2003; Diers, 2004; Poncet et al., 2004). GM as an Environmental Issue: The Dominant Framing of the Global Anti-GM/ GE Movement My earlier characterisation notwithstanding, the anti-GM/GE movement remains a diverse one, with many different shades of opinion and discourse. These differences in discursive practice vary considerably depending on the audience (e.g. whether the message is aimed at a general audience that visits a website, consists of public policy debates and hearings, or involves speeches to fellow activists). They also depend heavily on the context, particularly whether the setting is in the global North or global South.4 Nevertheless, the dominant reality is that the anti-GM movement’s discursive posture in the North (the centre of gravity of the movement in terms of resources and ability to influence global policy making) has progressively achieved the social construction of the GM issue as an environmental issue, broadly construed. That is to say, in the public arena, activist groups’ claims revolve around matters such as human food safety, environmental risks (such as pollen drift, gene drift, ‘superweeds’, Bt resistance, invasive-species-type effects, the absence of long-term testing for environmental and human health risks), and the need to invoke some variant of the precautionary principle in policy making (Tokar, 2001; Schurman & Kelso, 2003). In principle, however, opposition to GM crops could be anchored in a variety of claims and discourses. In addition to human health/safety and environmental concerns, grounds for objection include ethical issues (such as concern about ‘playing God’) (Howard & Rifkin, 1977), socio-economic impacts on farmers/peasantries, opposition to increased corporate control over agro-food systems, resistance to the increased role of patents and other proprietary protections on agro-food system discoveries, and so on. Each of these possible non-environmental objections to GM crop technology has a reasonably strong actual or potential empirical basis (Kleinman, 2005; Kloppenburg, 2005), and each plays a certain subordinate role in terms of the public framing of movement claims and discourses (Kleinman & Kinchy, 2003). The reasons why the GM issue has undergone environmentalisation of

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its key discursive framework are crucial for understanding the nature of the anti-GM movement, its politics, and its future. In the earliest days of anti-GM activism, GM issues were not primarily framed by opponents on the grounds of environmental/risk concerns. As Schurman and Munro (2003) have pointed out, the anti-GM/GE movement has long roots, most of which lie in the US – rather than in Europe, where antiGM sentiment is widely recognised as being most fervent and efficacious. These pioneering anti-GM activists relied to some degree on science- and environmentally driven discursive frames, but in the main their arguments were social (or social scientific) and ethical, and not predominantly ecological. Anti-GM activists such as Jeremy Rifkin stressed ethical concerns about willynilly genetic manipulation of humans, animals, and plants (Howard & Rifkin, 1977). Scientists such as Richard Lewontin criticised the scientific shortcomings and social biases of genetic reductionism (Lewontin, 2000). Other anti-GM activists such as Pat Mooney and Hope Shand stressed issues such as negative socio-economic impacts on farmers and peasants and the tendency of the new biotech complex – recombinant DNA, patent protection of genes and GM varieties, and global free trade agreements – to lead to corporate agricultural chemical and seed industry consolidation, to destruction of crop plant genetic resources, and to a lack of diversity in the seeds/chemicals/biotechnology industrial sector (see ETCgroup.org). Other early activists such as Jack Doyle anchored their critique of agricultural biotechnology squarely in terms of the need to oppose this and other abuses by agribusiness corporations (Doyle, 1985). Indeed, if there was a single organising ideological thread to 1980s opposition to GM among movement leadership in the North, it was based on a shared critique of corporate domination of agro-food systems. Beginning nearly simultaneously in the 1980s was a second discursive strand to the anti-GM movement, one that was by and large particular to struggles over GM crops and technologies in the South. This second discursive strand reflected not only the distinct character of these issues in the South, but also the fact that the groups that comprised the activist core of resistance to GM in the South consisted largely of those who were long-standing opponents of the green revolution and of conventional World Bank, US Agency for International Development (AID), and other official development policies (Shiva, 2000; Tokar, 2001; Schurman & Kelso, 2003; Kloppenburg, 2005). These activists argued that GM crops, which were justified by proponent interests in substantial measure on Malthusian grounds (the imperative to increase output and productivity in the developing world to feed a growing population, and to do so with dispatch), would be adverse for developing countries and their smallholder peasants. The predominant activist concern was that GM crops were developed primarily for ‘big ag’, rich peasants, and agribusiness interests, and that GM technology would serve as a further impetus to the destabilising, socially unequal diffusion of Western monocultural, input-intensive technology in the South (Stone, 2002). These two concerns were very deeply held among the pioneering activists, but most important for present purposes is the fact that these concerns

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generated very little traction in the US national political economy and in international development policy making in the 1980s and early 1990s.5 In the emerging Reagan–Thatcher era of structural adjustment, monetarism, and neoliberalism, the social-justice-type claims of the 1980s anti-GM movement lost their standing in the political systems of North America (and to some degree in Western Europe) and in the international development establishment.6 Put most simply, as neoliberalism became more fully established in the late 1980s and 1990s, institutions such as the World Bank and AID seldom had to worry that activists would be able to claim successfully that official development policies were having unequal effects and that they should, for this reason, be modified. As a result, by the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the Rio Earth Summit, non-governmental organisations’ (NGOs’) social critique of GM in terms of agribusiness domination and unequal impacts on small farmers and poor countries began to fade in importance, particularly in the North, where the key policy decisions are made. From the 1990s – especially from ‘Seattle’ and the massive 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization onwards – environmental critiques of GM agriculture increasingly shaped the movement’s framing, while socialjustice-type claims progressively lost their appeal.7 If the rise of neoliberalism undermined the efficacy of a social justice critique, a number of other factors led to the progressive environmentalisation of the anti-GM struggle. First, global environmentalism was relatively strong in the immediate aftermath of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and had far greater allegiance in the North than alternative claims such as those driven by concerns with social justice.8 Second, environmental/risk concerns resonated strongly with the concerns and worries of many European citizens in the aftermath of the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) or ‘mad cow’ scandal. Third, the environmental movement was a well-established one with hundreds of global groups and networks, and dozens of highly influential NGOs with well-established connections to power. The global environmental movement represented an existing structure with considerable resources that could be added to the existing campaign against GM crops/foods. Finally, in the 1990s, the US regulatory system was chaotic,9 and potentially vulnerable to critique, and global regulatory systems (such as governmental bodies in Europe, WTO-Codex, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, and the European Union (EU)) were in flux and so susceptible to movement influence (Stirling, 1998; Levidow, 2001).10 The Strategic Dangers of the Environmentalisation of the GM Struggle While the breadth of appeal of the environmental master frame clearly was and is an asset, there are weaknesses and limits to the environmentalisation of the GM struggle. Most US environmental groups that operate at a national or global scale have been at least nominally anti-GM since the 1999 Seattle uprising. But some of this opposition is superficial and some is likely opportunistic – being undertaken to recruit and retain members who were

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already strongly anti-GM. More importantly, on balance, the environmental/ risk critique of GM is vulnerable. As noted earlier, there are very clear environmental liabilities of most GM crops.11 But there are also empirical and rhetorical/ideological environmental advantages of GM crops that threaten to render the environmental critique relatively impotent. Empirically, for example, there is some tendency for Bt crops to use fewer pounds of active ingredient of insecticides per acre.12 Rhetorically or ideologically, proponents can say that herbicide-tolerant soybeans facilitate use of soil-saving no-till practices (which is essentially true). Indeed, no-till, which is a potent mechanisation technology, is essentially infeasible in soybean cultivation without herbicide-resistant varieties. No-till technology, however, makes possible huge expanses of corn/soybean monocultures under the management of one farmer–proprietor, and thereby locks in a certain minimum of soil erosion because of the prevalence of large-scale monoculture. This said, the prevailing agro-political culture in the US, Canada, Argentina, and Brazil – the countries that predominate among those that have adopted HR soybeans – is pervaded by the presumption that the future will inevitably be one in which ever-larger scales of soybean production will predominate. Viewed thus, the only important question is what technology is most productive and environmentally acceptable in large-scale soybean cultivation. The verdict on HR soybeans does not look decidedly negative when the question is posed in this manner. Perhaps the ultimate rhetorical weakness of the ecological critique of GM, however, is that it will be effectively countered by the three interrelated potential claims of GM proponents: that GM technology is not intrinsically more environmentally destructive than non-GM technology; that it makes no sense to have an elaborate regulatory system to head off environmental problems of GM crops while potentially environmentally flawed non-GM technology faces no regulatory scrutiny; and that, to be consistent, we should have a procedure to regulate the introduction of all new crop varieties, regardless of how they are produced. Indeed, the herbicide resistance trait has now been introduced into canola and soybeans through conventional plant breeding, and these crops portend just as much environmental threat as the GM form. As much as one might think it would be reasonable to have a comprehensive risk assessment regulatory process for all new crop varieties and other production technologies, this is simply not going to happen for reasons of expense and opposition by agribusiness firms. My conclusion, based on many years of study and from a point of view sympathetic to anti-GM activism, is thus that the ecological/risk critique has shortcomings, and will not endure. In sum, the environmental/risk critique that predominates in Europe and the US has weaknesses and faces the threat of being significantly undermined by corporate, university, and government actors, and by adverse scientific evidence and claims.13 If this assessment is correct, what new directions might the movement take?

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Thinking toward the Future The current environmental framing of the anti-GM movement has enjoyed one key advantage: there has been clarity of mostly achievable goals.14 The goals of movement activists in most of the Northern countries (the US, the EU, Japan) are to achieve a more rigorous state regulatory regime for GM product introductions and to stigmatise GM foods and the corporations that develop and market them. Particularly in Europe, the goal is to achieve and maintain a labelling regime to complicate and frustrate GM food commerce beyond the farm gate. Activist groups also aim to develop campaigns that keep the GM issue on citizens’ minds and reinforce perceptions of the negative aspects of GM crops and foods. On the international side, however, the goals are more diverse and complicated. One goal appears to be, in effect, to head off the international agricultural research system (especially the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) system, the major national agricultural research programmes, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) from casting their lot with GM methods and the biotechnology behemoths. A second goal is to discourage developing countries from planting GM crops (by, for example, conveying that growing GM crops might jeopardise exports to EU markets). A third objective is to influence developing countries’ regulatory systems in order to make it more difficult for products to be field tested, approved, and planted in the South (Shiva, 2000; Paarlberg, 2001). Two important related goals are to bolster the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which provides tools for countries to restrict GM imports on precautionary principle grounds,15 and to restrain the ability of the World Trade Organization regime’s sanitary and phytosanitary provisions from undermining Cartagena and the ability of governments to restrict GM products and imports. Finally, some civil society groups in the South aim to utilise a variety of tactics, such as organising demonstrations among peasants, to discourage governments from adopting pro-GM policies. This agenda is tangible and substantially achievable in the short to medium term. However, in the long term, this orientation raises questions about the future of the movement and how movement activists will relate to agricultural scientists. First, when the ecological rationale for opposition declines, there are the huge questions of what the movement’s ‘science strategy’ will be, and where the movement’s scientific allies will come from. In addition, if the movement is successful in discouraging private R&D and the introduction of GM crops, what course will the plant science R&D system take? In particular, what will become of public research systems? There is, of course, one standard response from movement quarters to these concerns – that researchers should pursue sustainable agriculture or organic farming rather than GM-type technology (see Kinnear (2004) for a classic analysis and set of arguments in this genre). This response is, however,

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unsatisfactory for several reasons. Sustainable agriculture is a research goal, whereas interspecific genetic engineering (or conventional sexual plant breeding) is a research method; the two are, thus, incommensurable or nonparallel. From my interviews with plant breeders, agronomists, and other plant scientists over the past few years, it seems clear that a substantial proportion of agronomists interested in sustainable agriculture, and of agro-ecologists, are not opposed to genetic engineering and genomics in principle, especially when it involves manipulating genes from closely related species or the same species. Most plant breeders whom I have formally interviewed, and others with whom I have spoken informally over many years, are strongly committed to breeding new crops for pest and disease resistance – which makes these breeding materials especially appropriate for sustainable systems. However, very few breeders and plant scientists would be prepared to forsake ‘genetic engineering’, if for no other reason than that it is useful in experiments and germ plasm evaluation and can be employed directly to introduce genes into cells of the same species. Anti-GM activists ritualistically cast aspersions on crop plant genomics, but among plant breeders only those trained more than 25 years ago and the most hide-bound are negative about the future potentials of genomics. Finally, much of what activist groups have in mind as sustainable agriculture – essentially retooled applied agronomy of the sort that predominated a few decades ago – is not regarded as scientifically interesting and challenging, even by scientists who are sympathetic to sustainability goals. It is inconceivable that major plant science funding agencies would come to view this as work deserving of scarce public funding. Many activists are aware of these facts and views and accordingly almost never secure or even attempt to secure strong alliances with public sector scientists. However, if the movement ever achieves its prime goal of constraining private GM R&D and commercialisation, we should be left with the question of who will develop new plant materials and varieties, and what the research goals that underlie this R&D will be. As time passes, there will be a need for activists to point to specific alternatives that involve the expertise of public sector scientists and for scientists other than, or in addition to, ecologists to be recruited as allies. While public sector scientists ultimately need to take on the mantle of sustainability themselves, they very much stand in need of cultivation and direction if they are to risk allying themselves with activists. They need to have some assurance that neither ‘basic research’ nor research at a molecular or genomic level will be opposed on principle by colleagues in the activist community. Many of these scientists would welcome external support from activist groups for their arguments in favour of fundamental/basic research programmes in sustainable agriculture, agro-ecology, and related areas, but most of these scientists will simply be unwilling to cast their lot with a style or type of research that virtually guarantees that they will be denied tenure and promotions. Indeed, it can be said that sustainable agriculture has been starved of research funds in the advanced countries partly because its most vocal

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constituents are suspicious, if not contemptuous, of basic research and of work at the molecular/genetic level. Those scientists who do work on sustainable agriculture feel pressure from their external constituents to do highly applied research and to prioritise on-farm research over laboratory research. There is also very little external constituency for breeding cultivars aimed specifically at organic or sustainable producers, and, as a result, most field crop sustainable agricultural producers in the US use largely the same cultivars (except that they are non-GM) as do traditional producers. Consequently, there are, in the US, no significant sustainable agricultural plant breeding programmes. The situation in international agricultural research has some similarities to that in the North but has its own distinctive characteristics. For example, in the developing world and the world of the CGIAR, there are endemic financial crises, so the big questions are not so much ‘can I get money to finance the research I want to do?’ but rather ‘what do my lab and my institute have to do to be able to survive over the next five years?’ Another big issue is how to prevent the CGIAR, which has been increasingly abandoned by the donor community, from feeling that its only remaining option is to side with deeppocketed biotechnology multinationals in order to survive in this milieu of fiscal insecurity. Activists need to collaborate with the CGIAR in the search for alternatives to the patronage of corporate biotechnology. Conclusion There are three potentially potent criticisms that can be made of GM technology, as I defined it earlier. One such criticism – that it is risky to the environment and human health – has been the key one stressed by the movement thus far. This line of criticism is reasonable – but it is potentially vulnerable to contrary (and contrived) scientific evidence. A second line of criticism – that GM is unnecessary – is one that has been made by movement organisations and leaders, but not persuasively. Opponents of GM have claimed that sustainable agriculture is a necessary and viable alternative, but this claim has little credibility among the mainstream scientific community because sustainable agriculture holds few opportunities for fundamental or basic research and because there is so little fundamental research in the pipeline. In addition, mainstream scientists are largely united on the point that agricultural science is inevitably going the way of molecular biology and that GE (thought not necessarily GM!) is a useful technique that should not be jettisoned. Opponents of GM have thus far declined to express interest in, or support for, molecular biological alternatives to GM, such as various applications of genomics (Tanksley & McCouch, 1997), marker-assisted selection (Diers, 2004), and quantitative trait locus analysis (Poncet et al., 2004), which exist or are being developed and which, in the eyes of many plant breeders and scientists, are actually seen as being viable or superior to GM technology. The existence of these new alternative techniques makes possible a third potentially very potent

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criticism – that GM is obsolete – that could usher in a fundamental reorientation of the politics of GM crops and foods.17 I anticipate that there will be major changes in the politics of GM crops and foods over the next decade, and perhaps much sooner. The 1990s environmentalisation of the GM issue was pivotal in contributing to the coalescence of the anti-GM movement and to the successes that it has registered thus far. Although environmental and health risks are likely to be potential problems with foreseeable generations of GM products, I anticipate that some of the weaknesses of the environmental/risk case against GM crops and foods will result in changes in the movement (and in the countermovement) over the next five to 10 years. I have suggested that one harbinger of change in the movement is the actual and potential changes in the practices of public agricultural scientists and the relationships between movement activists and the agricultural science community. On the horizon is the ability of the movement to make persuasive claims that GM is unnecessary and obsolete. These potential post-environmental claims are increasingly being given substance by research being conducted in public research institutions – by scientists who, more often than not, now see the anti-GM movement as inconsistent with their worldviews and interests. Plant-molecular-breeding techniques now exist (and are being developed) that enable GE to be pursued without using synthetic genes or genes from distantly related species. There are indications that methods such as marker-assisted selection and quantitative loci analysis can make possible the development of breeding materials that contain multi-gene resistance to multiple pests such as insects, diseases, and weeds. In turn, these methods can make possible varieties that can contribute significantly to sustainable agriculture (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2003). For the present, however, it will mainly fall on the activists to initiate the contacts that could lead to such alliances. It may be that some far-sighted activists will recognise the long-term problems of couching anti-GM agendas primarily in terms of environmental discourses and will recognise the relevance of alternative postenvironmental strategies of the sort I have outlined here. Note 1. This discursive frame coexists with and complements a range of others, particularly in the relatively distinct case of the GM politics in the global South, in which environmental frames play a role but do not predominate. See Hindmarsh (2004) for a very useful depiction of antiGM movements and resistance in the global South. The list of signatories to the petition created by the Institute for Food and Development Policy (‘Food First’) in opposition to ‘terminator’ (see Jefferson (2001) for an accessible technical discussion) is a useful inventory of the main transnational and national groups involved in these struggles; http://www.foodfirst.org/progs/global/ge/jointstatement2002.html. Schurman and Munro (2003) provide an excellent overview of the anti-GM movement, with particular emphasis on the US, while Schurman (2004) does so ably for Western Europe. There are dozens of nationally and globally oriented groups involved in the movement. Some of the most prominent groups include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth International, the Union of Concerned Scientists,

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Environmental Defense, the ETC Group (formerly RAFI), Genetic Resources Action International, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Food First, the Institute for Science in Society, the British Soil Association, the Consumer Policy Institute, and the Sierra Club. On recent developments in GM technology see Kloppenburg (2005). By ‘successfully’, I mean in terms of both agronomic performance and relative social acceptability. The fact that soybeans, corn, canola, and cotton are not (mainly) staple food crops has been critical in enabling relatively uncontested (compared to the European case) adoption of these varieties in the US and Canada. Important insights as to why this has not been the case in Europe are provided by Schurman (2004). See the assorted articles in Schurman and Kelso (2003) and Stone (2002). These concerns have occasionally undergirded some impressive demonstrations and other instances of resistance in countries such as India and Thailand. For an alternative perspective on the history of discursive framing by the anti-GM movement see Kleinman and Kinchy (2003). For an extended analysis of this point, see Buttel (2003). The strength of environmentalism at the time can be gauged by the number of sociologists who saw this movement as one of a handful of signature social movements of the 1990s see, e.g. Rootes (1999, 2004). The agricultural biotechnology regulatory framework in the US, which was basically a patched-together regulatory system based on existing (pre-rDNA (recombinant DNA)) laws and implemented by existing agencies, has been chaotic enough to have inspired occasional highly critical reports from entities such as the Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources, National Research Council (2002). The key reason for the development of this chaotic regulatory system was a response to corporate interests’ demand that the regulatory system do as little as possible to single out biotechnology products for regulatory scrutiny, which would thereby stigmatise them as being dangerous because of the rDNA methods used to develop them. It is also the case that struggles over GM crops/foods are in some sense the quintessential science-driven social movement in that, regardless of frames embraced and discourses engaged in, most of these struggles lend themselves to input by scientists and other academics, and revolve around struggles over scientific knowledges. In this regard, the anti-GM movement has found it fairly easy to make inroads among professional ecologists and environmental scientists. Accordingly, movement groups recruited dozens of allies from the ranks of university and independent ecologists. By comparison, the anti-GM movement has attracted the allegiance of very few agricultural scientists whose primary discipline was other than ecology. These liabilities are crop- and/or trait-specific. See Krimsky and Wrubel (1996) for a useful overview. There have been fierce debates on the topic of whether specific GM crops or GM crops in general result in less or more use of synthetic pesticides (compare Benbrook (2001) and Fernandez-Cornejo and McBride (2000)). A disinterested individual looking at the available evidence perhaps would draw three conclusions about this evidence: (1) Bt crops tend to result in somewhat lower use of insecticides compared to conventional varieties; (2) HR crops tend to result in somewhat more use of (typically relatively benign) herbicides, but with the likelihood that development of ‘superweeds’ would substantially modify this conclusion; and (3) GM crops in general are not demonstrably worse in overall environmental terms than conventional ones under very-large-scale monocultural conditions, and under conditions with relatively low potential for soil erosion there may be slight advantages to GM crops. In July 2004, a major US National Academies of Science report concluded that there are no human health implications of GM foods that are unique or intrinsic to the technology, and observed that ‘to date, no adverse health effects attributed to genetic engineering have been documented in the human population’ (National Research Council, 2004: 180). For a short summary see http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/28/science/28study.html.

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14. See Schurman (2004) for a perceptive and comprehensive analysis of how the anti-GM movement has been able to register particularly impressive successes in Western Europe. 15. See Falkner (2004) for a brief analysis of the importance and the fragility of Cartagena. 16. It is worth noting that while there are some similarities in the social issues involved in crop plant and human genomics, for the most part these issues are quite distinct. There is no better testament to this than the fact that Richard Lewontin (2001) of Harvard University, who has been a tireless opponent of genetic reductionism in the human biosciences, has few reservations about agriculture making greater use of genomics knowledge. 17. While the notion that GM (in the sense of single-gene input-trait GE using exotic genes) is obsolete may seem preposterous to some, it should be stressed that there is an emerging literature in molecular biology and plant breeding in which this conclusion is increasingly being reached (e.g. Jefferson, 2001). Relatedly, the well-known plant geneticist Steven Strauss (2003) has recently published a major paper in the prestigious journal Science in which he distinguishes sharply between GM crops (which he defines as I have above) and ‘genomicsguided transgene’ crops (in which GE or other molecular methods are used to manipulate genes within the same species or closely related species). Strauss regards genomics-guided transgene crops as being essentially similar to conventionally bred crops and to have far fewer potential risks than GM crops.

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