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Workshop on Biotech Contentions
Abstracts & Biographies
April 25-26 , 2008
229 ILR Conference Center, Cornell University
Schedule
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The Spectrum of Opposition to GM Crops in India
Richard Bownas, Government, Cornell University
This talk will describe the loose coalition of activists that have been opposing GM crops in India since the late 1990's. Specifically, I point to four sub-groups within this coalition and describe their often contradictory interests in using Bt Cotton as symbol: 'romantic ruralists' such as Vandana Shiva; 'market environmentalists' such as Greenpeace and the Center for Sustainable Agriculture; 'pro-farmer populists' such as Kishore Tiwari in Maharashtra; and 'NGO paternalists' such as DDS and MARI in Andhra Pradesh.
Richard Bownas is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative politics in the Government Department at Cornell University, and for the last year has been conducting field research on the politics of GM crops in Europe and India, with special reference to the connections between activists in Europe and India.
Forbidden Fruit: Transgenic Papaya in Thailand
Sarah Nell Davidson, Plant Biology, Cornell University
Genetically engineered (GE), virus resistant papaya was widely and rapidly adopted by Hawaiian growers in the late 1990’s. Yet, developing countries that stand to benefit from this technology have failed to approve GE papaya, despite the fact that it is close to an ideal “pro-poor” genetically engineered crop. In Thailand, where papaya is a staple food, virus infection rates in some areas are as high as 100%. There, GE, virus-resistant papaya has become the “poster child,” both literally and figuratively, for the debate over agricultural biotechnology and is perceived as a “gateway” to other genetically engineered crops. This essay examines the political and social factors that have stymied the technology in Thailand, including the lack of farmer engagement in the debate, which is largely dominated by anti-GE non-governmental NGO networks, and a largely negative press.
Sarah Davidson is a Ph.D. student in Plant Biology at Cornell University. Her interdisciplinary program focuses on the study and practice of science writing within the plant sciences discipline. Her doctoral dissertation consists of a collection of case studies, papers in peer-reviewed journals, and articles for mass media, all of which stem from her research on the controversy surrounding genetically modified papaya in developing countries. She spent the 2006-2007 academic year living in rural Thailand, conducting dissertation research.
'GMO'
as Generative Frame: Targets, Choke Points, Coalitions
Ron Herring, Government, Cornell University
Genetic engineering has enabled significant –- and widely accepted -- innovations in medicine and pharmaceuticals, and promises advances in other fields of human health and industry. However, agricultural biotechnology has ignited political opposition that has limited the development and deployment of new traits, cultivars and applications. A global cognitive divide around the construct and valence of “GMOs” has been the mechanism for limiting the diffusion of innovations, and innovation itself. What distinguished the GMO from the non-GMO was the use of recombinant DNA technology to induce novel traits. Reification of the "GMO" has had profound consequences for the politics and economics of biotechnology. Lumping and splitting within the covering frame “GMO” allocates threat and risk to some products of rDNA technologies – but not others. The frame itself has furthered transnational coalitions protesting the spread of transgenic crops. This cognitive rift extends beyond the sterile debates of science vs Luddism; protestors against GMOs are by no means opposed to technology, but do have strong interests in some technologies and not others. Though this framing has proved to be quite powerful and consequential, there are reasons to believe it is both conjunctural and ephemeral.
Ron Herring has taught political economy and political ecology at Cornell University since 1991. Recent work includes an edited volume Transgenics and the Poor with Routledge [Oxford: 2007; 2008]. Articles on biotechnology politics and policy have appeared in the Journal of Development Studies, Critical Asian Studies, India in Transition and various edited volumes and web publications. Previous interests include connections between economic development and ethnicity -- e.g. Carrots, Sticks and Ethnic Conflict: Rethinking Development Assistance (University of Michigan Press, edited with Milton Esman) and reviving class analytics -- e.g. Whatever Happened to Class? edited with Rina Agarwala, Routledge 2008.
Civic Science, Authoritative Science, and the Politics of Biotechnology in India
Milind Kandlikar, Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia
That GM crops are controversial in India is by now widely appreciated. What is less understood are the reasons for these controversies and their emergence, and what if anything might mitigate them in the future. This talk analyzes the controversy related to yields of BT cotton in India. We map the controversy in terms of the actors and their roles, and we analyze the arguments deployed by various actors in this drama. We go on to locate the controversy within broader patterns of the way in which science--both 'civic' and authoritative--influences policy debates related to the environment in India.
Milind Kandlikar (Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon) is an Assistant Professor, jointly appointed to Liu Institute for Global Issues and the Institute of Asian Research, at the University of British Columbia. His work focuses on the intersection of technology diffusion, human development, and the global environment. His current projects include cross-national comparisons of regulation of agricultural biotechnology; air quality in Indian cities; risks and benefits of nanotechnology; and the assessment of new technologies for sustainable transportation. He has also published extensively on the science and policy of climate change.
How
Transnational Movements Matter: Assessing the Battle Over Biotechnology in Africa
William Munro, Political Science, Illinois Wesleyan University
In this paper, I draw on Sidney Tarrow’s notion of a transnational political opportunity space and Sarah Soule’s argument about the importance of contingency to explore these questions in trying to assess how (local, distant, and transnational) anti-GM activism has affected the trajectory of agricultural technology debates in Africa. Empirically, I examine the role of activists in two specific cases. One is the slowness with which African countries have developed biosafety regulatory frameworks, despite the availability of an effective ‘permissive’ model provided by South Africa. Under these conditions, given the urgency of addressing the challenges of low agricultural productivity and food security, major international funders, multilateral organizations, and national governments began to redirect research resources away from transgenic technologies towards non-GM technologies and training. The other case is the role of activists in causing the high-end South African food retailer, Woolworths, to declare itself GM-free (as far as possible) and to begin sourcing agricultural products from poor farming communities using organic or low-tech farming methods (this is a corporate social responsibility project). Neither of these outcomes was expected by activists, and the cases provide an opportunity to assess how activists made a difference.
Why Rich Societies Do Not Like GMO Foods and Crops
Robert Paarlberg, Political Science, Wellesley College
Citizen views toward GMO foods and crops are often depicted as positive in America and negative in Europe, but they actually tend to be negative in both places. Regulations are more permissive in the United States, but American consumers – when asked about the technology – express views nearly as wary as those of Europeans. Another mistaken impression is that citizens are wary of GMOs due to possible risks. This cannot possibly be the case, first because after a dozen years of widespread experience with the technology not a single new risk has been documented, and second because these same citizens eagerly welcome GMOs in medicine despite very large risks from recombinant drugs. They take the drugs despite the risk because they value the possible benefit. It is not the presence of a risk but the absence of any direct benefit that matters most for GMO foods and crops. Citizens in rich societies do not like this technology because, so far at least, it has given most of them no direct benefit. In prosperous post-agricultural societies, the direct benefits of GMO foods and crops go only to a tiny minority of the population: farmers, seed companies, and patent holders.
Robert Paarlberg is the Betty Freyhof Johnson Class of 1944 Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College and Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Paarlberg's principal research interests are international agricultural policy and science policy. His latest book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa (Harvard University Press, March 2008), explains why poor African farmers are denied access to productive technologies, particularly genetically engineered seeds with improved resistance to insects and drought.
What “Environment” to Protect from Genetically Modified Organisms?: How Agricultural Biotechnology Debates Became Environmentalized in France, Japan, and the United States
Kyoko Sato, ISS, Cornell University
This paper examines how the debates over agricultural biotechnology became “environmentalized” differently in France, Japan and the United States. Not only the degrees to which the debates centered on environmental issues, but also the notions of “the environment” to be protected from potential risks of genetically modified organisms, varied over time and across these three countries. For instance, the three countries took different positions toward the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, an international agreement adopted in January 2000 to regulate the movement of living GMOs to protect biodiversity. France and the European Union signed the Protocol with little controversy in May 2000 and introduced a law aimed to protect all living organisms, including human health. After some debate, Japan acceded to the Protocol in 2003, but its domestic law narrowly covered the effect of living GMOs on wildlife in Japan, but not agricultural crops or human health. Meanwhile, the United States has maintained that no scientific evidence suggests modern biotechnology poses specific biodiversity risks and has not become a Party to the Protocol. The paper explores different criteria, frames, and symbolic images of the environment that have been invoked in the debates in the three countries and investigate their relationship with policy developments.
Kyoko Sato is a Postdoctoral Associate of the Contentious Knowledge Project at Cornell University’s Institute for the Social Sciences. Her dissertation (Department of Sociology, Princeton University, 2007) explored the processes through which France, Japan, and the United States developed different policy frameworks for genetically modified food. In particular, she examined how different understandings of GM food emerged in each country’s public discourses and how they interacted with policy developments. She is primarily interested in how culture and politics intersect in different national contexts.
Contentious Lifeworlds and the Enduring Struggle over Agricultural Biotechnology
Rachel Schurman, Sociology, University of Minnesota
William Munro, Political Science, Illinois Wesleyan University
In this workshop, we’ll argue that a novel way of understanding the heated and sustained controversies that have arisen around agricultural biotechnology is through the notion of “contending lifeworlds.” Although the concept of “lifeworld” is generally associated with the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, we use the term somewhat less abstractly to connote a local culture and the people actively constituting it. As we conceptualize them, lifeworlds are at once cognitive, normative, and social, and are collectively constituted in a particular space of interaction, or milieu. Like the local cultures they encompass, lifeworlds are characterized by “shared mental worlds,” or a set of beliefs, assumptions, images and value judgments about how the world works, as well as particular ways of thinking and categorizing things. In our view, the significance of the lifeworld for understanding the biotechnology controversy is that it can be seen to generate—and naturalize—certain broad visions of the world as well as interpretations of specific phenomena. These, in turn, predispose people to validate, and invalidate, particular knowledge claims, as well as to impel social actions that are consistent with these cognitive and normative understandings. In addition to offering what we hope is a new theoretical perspective on the roots of ag biotech contention, we will empirically explore how the lifeworlds of social activists, industry officials, and scientists lead them to privilege certain ways of knowing and understanding these technologies and their meanings, and how these alternative ways of knowing have led to a social/political conflict that has endured for over 30 years.
The Socio-political Tactics of the Andhra Pradesh (AP) Anti-GM lobby: How True Are Stories of “Sheep Death” Due to Bt Cotton?
Sivramiah [Shanthu] Shantaram, President, Biologistics International
C. Kameswara Rao, Foundation for Biotechnology Awareness and Education
This paper will report on a fact-finding visit to villages of Warangal district in AP, the epicenter of sheep death, in December 2006. We found that the narrative of the NGOs, both on sheep and agronomics of Bt cotton, to be factually inaccurate. The questions for the paper are: What is the logic of making outlandish claims that veer so far from reality? Is the assumption that foreign funders of these local brokers will never come to Warangal to investigate local conditions, but instead publish local reports as authentic? Or is the logic to lay the groundwork for Government payments for dead sheep, as happened in the compensation for the “failure of Bt cotton” in 2004? Or is it possible that well-meaning people in the movement are simply deceived? Or is the necessity of unsettling the conventional – scientific – narrative part of a strategy of controversy as a mode of production?
Shanthu Shantharam is the President of Biologistics International, a biotech management and consulting company in the USA. Dr. Shantharam has over 25 years of experience as a scientist (molecular biologist and biotechnologist). He served as a Branch Chief of the USDA office of Biotechnology Regulatory Services in Washington DC for over 14 years, and worked as a visiting biotechnology advisor to the World Bank in the mid 1990s. He was a visiting research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC from 2001 to 2002. He was Head of Technology Communications for Syngenta International in Basel, Switzerland and was also Global Head of their Regulatory Compliance Unit. Some of his clients in the area of biotechnology and biosafety are US-AID, UN-FAO, UNIDO, UNEP-GEF, and ADB. He presently directs a biotechnology management courses at the Asian Institute of Management in Bangkok. Dr. Shantharam is an experienced biotechnology regulatory affairs expert, biosafety and a biotechnology risk assessment specialist.
