space for raising questions and has been used very effectively by GM movements,
even if the storylines are excessively dramatic. Thus, in Europe the spectre of
‘Frankenstein foods’ or ‘Terminator’ genes, even if strictly unscientific, allowed an
otherwise constrained debate to enter the public sphere. Wider, more direct-action
style protests have also characterized anti-GM campaigns, including consumer
boycotts and ‘trolley dumping’, or crop burning and the destruction of field trials.
Other campaigners have taken a more positive stance, demonstrating alternatives
that are sustainable and based on local seed systems, and open access research and
development. Demonstration projects have proliferated, under a variety of banners,
showing that ‘other worlds’ are indeed possible (Levidow and Carr, 2007).
Different campaigns at different moments in different regions have focused on
different elements of the debate, whether on consumer health, farmers’ rights or
environmental impacts. This has resulted in some tensions. As Scoones (2008, p340)
notes: ‘Holding a broad front often means engineering strategic silences about some
tough issues, with contradictions and tensions held in abeyance. But avoiding some
of these deeper issues may also mean the unravelling of coalitions and alliances’.
Not everyone in the movement has agreed with all these tactics, and intense debates
have emerged about the pros and cons of each.
Two decades since the start of the movement, has there been progress towards
a greener, more sustainable form of agricultural technology? Success has been patchy.
There has been retreat and roll-back over time, not least because controlling the
distribution of seeds is nigh on impossible. Thus in India, GM crops were
distributed ‘by stealth’ by entrepreneurs with the quiet acceptance of the property
rights holding companies (Herring, 2005) and in Brazil the flood of GM seeds across
the border from Argentina was unstoppable. In the context of a rapidly liberalizing
agriculture seeking external investment in a neoliberal market economy where
government capacity for regulation was weak or non-existent, the opportunities
of sustained opposition were, of course, limited. Corporate messaging has also shifted
in response. Having dramatically lost the public relations war at the outset, GM is
now marketed as an environmentally sound alternative to agrochemicals, and in
some quarters as a technological response to climate change. Others argue that
GM per se is not the problem but the corporate control of agri-food systems, and
that publicly funded and regulated alternatives – from China and beyond – offer
sustainable alternatives.
Much as the rearguard responses of the techno-optimists aiming to tackle
environmental problems more generally exclude politics, so have these responses
from corporate agriculture and their backers. Yet many of the anti-GM campaigns
have got trapped in the terms of this discourse, often as regulatory systems and
legal cases require it, and have not articulated effectively the larger political critique.
The limits to green transformations in this case thus concern less a disarticulation
of local and global concerns as networks build and become institutionalized, and
more a depoliticization of the debate. Drawing lessons from the case makes clear
that fundamental transformations cannot occur through changing a technology,
but only the wider sociopolitical system within which it is embedded.
126 Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones
even if the storylines are excessively dramatic. Thus, in Europe the spectre of
‘Frankenstein foods’ or ‘Terminator’ genes, even if strictly unscientific, allowed an
otherwise constrained debate to enter the public sphere. Wider, more direct-action
style protests have also characterized anti-GM campaigns, including consumer
boycotts and ‘trolley dumping’, or crop burning and the destruction of field trials.
Other campaigners have taken a more positive stance, demonstrating alternatives
that are sustainable and based on local seed systems, and open access research and
development. Demonstration projects have proliferated, under a variety of banners,
showing that ‘other worlds’ are indeed possible (Levidow and Carr, 2007).
Different campaigns at different moments in different regions have focused on
different elements of the debate, whether on consumer health, farmers’ rights or
environmental impacts. This has resulted in some tensions. As Scoones (2008, p340)
notes: ‘Holding a broad front often means engineering strategic silences about some
tough issues, with contradictions and tensions held in abeyance. But avoiding some
of these deeper issues may also mean the unravelling of coalitions and alliances’.
Not everyone in the movement has agreed with all these tactics, and intense debates
have emerged about the pros and cons of each.
Two decades since the start of the movement, has there been progress towards
a greener, more sustainable form of agricultural technology? Success has been patchy.
There has been retreat and roll-back over time, not least because controlling the
distribution of seeds is nigh on impossible. Thus in India, GM crops were
distributed ‘by stealth’ by entrepreneurs with the quiet acceptance of the property
rights holding companies (Herring, 2005) and in Brazil the flood of GM seeds across
the border from Argentina was unstoppable. In the context of a rapidly liberalizing
agriculture seeking external investment in a neoliberal market economy where
government capacity for regulation was weak or non-existent, the opportunities
of sustained opposition were, of course, limited. Corporate messaging has also shifted
in response. Having dramatically lost the public relations war at the outset, GM is
now marketed as an environmentally sound alternative to agrochemicals, and in
some quarters as a technological response to climate change. Others argue that
GM per se is not the problem but the corporate control of agri-food systems, and
that publicly funded and regulated alternatives – from China and beyond – offer
sustainable alternatives.
Much as the rearguard responses of the techno-optimists aiming to tackle
environmental problems more generally exclude politics, so have these responses
from corporate agriculture and their backers. Yet many of the anti-GM campaigns
have got trapped in the terms of this discourse, often as regulatory systems and
legal cases require it, and have not articulated effectively the larger political critique.
The limits to green transformations in this case thus concern less a disarticulation
of local and global concerns as networks build and become institutionalized, and
more a depoliticization of the debate. Drawing lessons from the case makes clear
that fundamental transformations cannot occur through changing a technology,
but only the wider sociopolitical system within which it is embedded.
126 Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones