Frankenpolitics: The Left's defence of GMOs

Image:BASF

At EUobserver 9-01-2014

The global movement against genetic modification, it is fair to say, does in general spring from the green-left side of the political spectrum, but is anti-GM campaigning actually that left-wing?

In May last year, UK activists from Take the Flour Back announced that they were going to "decontaminat" - or tear up - GM wheat being tested by the Rothamsted Research institute, one of the oldest agricultural research bodies in the world.

The grain being tested gives off an odour that repels aphids, and also attract wasps that parasitise the insects. As a result, the wheat, developed by publicly funded scientists, would require less synthetic pesticide - a development that is hardly likely to deliver profits to the pesticide manufacturers.

The next month, a 30-year-old research project in Italy, involving transgenic olive trees, cherry trees and kiwifruit vines - one of the longest-running GM trials in Europe - was ordered destroyed with only a few days' notice by a court under pressure from an anti-GM group, the Genetic Rights Foundation.

The hoped-for result of the non-profit research, lead by plant scientist Eddo Rugini at the University of Tuscia, not concocted by any moustache-twiddling villains at Monsanto HQ, would again be a limit in the need for pesticides.

Students and colleagues stood by the aging Ruggini in solidarity amid the olive groves, but still the bulldozers arrived to rip up his life's work. The elderly scientist was devastated. Colleagues encouraged him to move to the United States, where he had received offers of work and where the mood is less fearful, but he replied despondently that he was simply too tired now.

When I was in Mexico last year investigating a series of bombings of nanotechnology researchers by eco-anarchists, I met a husband-and-wife team of molecular biologists working at a public university whose lab had twice been the target of anti-GM arsonists of a similar ideology to the nanotech bombers.

The scientists described themselves as socialists and strong supporters of the recent mass Yo Soy 132 protests against electoral corruption by the right. They were also keen to say how they were very much opponents of agribusiness.

Indeed, they said how they were frustrated that historically a great deal of crop research had been performed by Northern experts with little knowledge of the needs of Mexican farmers and consumers. So their aim instead was to develop transgenic crops resistant to drought and insects that built on local knowledge. Their work developing GM crops was a product of their belief in social justice, not an exception to it.

Is it beyond the imagination of anti-GM activists that genetic modification could be used for public benefit instead of private profit? The activists may well be sincere in opposing social injustice, but all the same, they think that these problems arise from something inherent in the technology. In so doing, the complaint is in fact about technology and progress itself.

The Left used to be quite clear that technologies used in the context of colonisation and exploitation in another political and economic context could be liberatory. We did not want to do away with industry, but rather capture it and run it democratically.

There is nothing intrinsically malign about any particular technology outside of the context in which it is used...

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