Anti-GMO Strategies and Frames: Global Trends in the Growth of Resistance to GMOs
by Jillian Sherman
B.A. in Geography, B.A. in Anthropology, June 2012, The Ohio State University
A Thesis submitted to
The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
May 18, 2014
Thesis directed by
Mona Atia Professor of Geography and International Affairs
© Copyright 2014 by Jillian Sherman All rights reserved
ii
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge Dr. Mona Atia for acting as a primary advisor on this project and Dr. Marie Price for acting as a secondary advisor and reader. She also wishes to thank The George Washington University Department of Geography for offering the Campbell Summer Research Grant to complete this project.
iii Abstract of Thesis
Anti-GMO Strategies and Frames: Global Trends in the Growth of Resistance to GMOs
Due to the increasing stresses on the agricultural sector that have been caused by factors such as population growth and changing ecological dynamics, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been promoted as a technological answer for problems relating to yield increase, pest resistance, and herbicide tolerance. While this technology has experienced high levels of adoption across the globe, it has also experienced great levels of resistance, and has led to the creation of numerous anti-GMO movements. A discourse analysis of various journals, news articles, and social media outlets was completed in order to look at the spatial patterns associated with the success or failure of the anti-GMO movement across the globe. The prevalence of protest activity in each country was compared to ISAAA data on GMO quantities, crops, and traits per country so that trends in GMO adoption and opposition could be established. This paper considers the role of the actor, as well as the role of the political, legal, and social institutions in place in the countries experiencing GMO growth and resistance. It examines a number of different resistance tactics, paying particular attention to case studies employing the labeling (USA), banning (Mexico), and destruction (France) of GMOs in order to determine why some tactics and geographic locations have experienced success in fighting off GMOs while others have not. Finally, the various framing techniques employed by the movement are addressed within the study so that movement success can be explained within the context of each resistance tactic.
iv Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ...... iii
Abstract of Thesis ...... iv
List of Figures ...... vi
List of Tables ...... vii
List of Acronyms ...... viii
Chapter 1: Introduction, Literature Review, and Methodology ...... 1
Chapter 2: Current State of GMO Growth and Resistance ...... 32
Chapter 3: Small-Scale Agriculture and Food Sovereignty Framing ...... 63
Chapter 4: Labeling: The US Case Study ...... 77
Chapter 5: Moratoria: The Mexican Case Study ...... 119
Chapter 6: Direct Action: The French Case Study ...... 137
Chapter 7: Conclusion ...... 163
References ...... 175
Appendix A: Coding and Development of Main Themes ...... 194
Appendix B: GMO Growth Patterns for Each Case Study ...... 195
Appendix C: Development of Specific GMO Traits and Crops ...... 196
Appendix D: Overview of Tactics and Locations Included in this Research ...... 197
v List of Figures
Figure 1: Study Areas of Interest ...... 29
Figure 2: Global Growth of GMOs Per Country ...... 32
Figure 3: Developing vs. Industrial GM Growth (% of Total) ...... 34
Figure 4: Relationship Between Seed, Chemical, and Other Companies ...... 40
Figure 5: Levels of Resistance in the Anti-GMO Movement ...... 62
Figure 6: Three Spheres of Food Sovereignty ...... 74
Figure 7: Adoption of Genetically Engineered Crops in the United States, 1996-2013 ... 84
Figure 8: American States with Proposed Labeling ...... 92
Figure 9: Northeast Labeling Cluster ...... 94
Figure 10: California Proposition 37 Results ...... 97
Figure 11: Washington Initiative 522 County Results ...... 101
Figure 12: Global GE Food Labeling Laws ...... 104
Figure 13: Transgenic Free Territories in Costa Rica...... 132
Figure 14: Examples of Direct Action from Case Studies and Comparison Cases ...... 153
Figure 15: Schema of Frames, Goals, and Success for Each Case Study ...... 168
vi List of Tables
Table 1: First Year of GMO Commercialization Per Country ...... 35
Table 2: Definition of Frames, Goals, and Success for Court Cases ...... 52
Table 3: Definition of Frames, Goals, and Success for Direct Action ...... 57
Table 4: Definition of Frames, Goals, and Success for Bans ...... 60
Table 5: Use of Framing in Each Country ...... 64
Table 6: Definition of Frames, Goals, and Success for Labeling ...... 81
Table 7: USA Labeling Polls ...... 103
Table 8: Frames, Goals, and Success of Moratoria in Mexico ...... 126
Table 9: Examples of Crop Destruction Activities in France ...... 140
Table 10: Activist Frames, Goals, and Successes in France ...... 144
Table 11: Examples of Crop Destruction in Other Countries ...... 154
vii List of Acronyms
APHIS Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
AWOC Agricultural Workers Organization Committee
CP Confédération Paysanne
EPA Environmental Protection Agency
FDA Food and Drug Administration
FD&C Act Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act
FIFRA Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act
FV Faucheurs Volontaires
GE Genetic Engineering
GM Genetically Modified
GMOs Genetically Modified Organisms
HYVs High Yielding Varieties
IPC International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty
IPR Intellectual Property Rights
ISAAA International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications
KRRS Karnataka Rajya Ryota Sangha (Karnataka State Farmers Association)
LMO Living Modified Organism
LOS Legal Opportunity Structures
NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement
NFWA National Farm Workers Association
NIABY Not In Any BackYard
NIMB Not In My Body
viii NIMBY Not In My BackYard
NSM New Social Movement
PIP Plant Incorporated Protectant
POS Political Opportunity Structure
PVPA Plant Variety Protection Act
RMT Resource Mobilization Theory
TFTs Transgenic Free Territories
TSCA Toxic Substances Control Act
USDA United States Department of Agriculture
WTO World Trade Organization
WTP Willingness to Pay
ix Chapter 1: Introduction, Literature Review, and Methodology
The Green Revolution, and later Gene Revolution, developed at a time when many feared for the fate of global society in the face of exponential population growth.
Thomas Malthus said that man is always attempting to use resources at a rate that is
“beyond the means of subsistence” (Malthus 2010:4). However, this population expansion is kept from reaching critical numbers due to the existence of checks on population growth such as disease and famine. Paul Ehrlich expanded upon this idea in
1969 by suggesting that if global population rates continued to increase at their current rates, then the world would soon reach the “logical conclusion” of mass starvation
(Ehrlich 1969:13). In light of this Malthusian scenario, countries pursued two strategies: reducing population and expanding agricultural yields.
Both the Green Revolution and the subsequent Gene Revolution focused on the development of the techniques and technology used in agricultural toward methods that were seen as more modern and intensive. As a way to improve yield and minimize the amount of hungry people, experts sought agricultural methods that would emphasize characteristics such as controllability, efficiency, intensity of production, and certainty
(Parayil 2003). Technological developments were promoted as a way to ensure controllability of results (Parayil 2003).
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are plants, animals, or microbes that have been genetically modified by the implantation of foreign DNA into their genetic code with the hope of creating novel combinations that will favor certain characteristics
(Delborne and Kinchy 2011). Ideally, they will exhibit traits that will cause them to be high yielding varieties (HYVs) that are resistant to pests and diseases, and that necessitate
1 minimal amounts of fertilizer and other inputs (Atkins and Bowler 2000). The term GMO is sometimes thought of as a “political shorthand” used to represent a number of different types of biotechnology (Herring 2010). While the technology used for genetic engineering has been around since the 1970s, the first genetically modified (GM) plant, tobacco, was not invented until 1983, and the cultivation of GM crops for commercial use in the United States did not really begin until 1996 (García-Lopez and Arizpe 2010).
A variety of GM crops have been grown since the early years of technology, with some experiencing more success than others. As of 2012, the four main GM crops include soybeans, maize, cotton, and canola, with soybeans consistently representing the largest share (James 2012). Traits promoted in GM crops include virus resistance, insect resistance, and herbicide tolerance, with “stacked” traits such as the stacked herbicide tolerance and insect resistance trait increasing in use (James 2012). Herbicide tolerant
GMOs, which were produced to be resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, have been the most widely grown GM crop since 1997 (James 2012). The development of GMO traits and crops can be found in Appendix C, with the graphs showing each as a percentage of the all GMOs.
Some argue that GMOs have experienced the most rapid adoption rates of any technology in history (Schurman and Munro 2010). Proponents of GMOs point to positive characteristics such as increased yield, minimized chemical input need, minimized environmental impact, and a maximization of beneficial properties such as drought resistance, shelf life, and nutritional value as a reason to promote the technology
(Schiffman and Robbins 2011). Due to this promised increase in chemical, land, and workload efficiency, it has been stated that GMOs have the potential to actually save
2 farmers money (Brookes and Barfoot 2006). Companies promoting biotechnology claim that it has the ability to minimize environmental degradation and reduce the cost of food for the general public as well (Huffman 2003). Also, some developing nations claim that investing in biotechnology is important for the development of their knowledge-based economies and global economic status (Schurman 2004). All of these factors have led supporters of the technology to consider GMO growth to be an “everybody wins” scenario (Schurman and Munro 2010).
While some people see biotechnology as a beneficial agricultural technique, others consider it to be a lot more controversial. This controversy was brought to the forefront in 2002, when U.S. food aid to Africa was rejected due to its GM properties
(Wu 2004). Schurman (2004) stated that what is so fascinating about the anti-GMO movement is that there was no real environmental or public health event that led to the development of the movement. Unlike situations where a specific instance of institutional failure led to public outrage, in many cases the anti-GMO movement seems to pre-date any kind of real controversy (Schurman 2004).
While this may be true, there have been a few instances since the introduction of
GMOs that have led the public to question the efficacy of its institutions in managing a technology such as GMOs. The first event occurred in 1996, when Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease began to appear in humans who ate meat tainted with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Seifert 2009). The government’s demonstrated inability to guarantee the health of its meat caused many to lose faith in its regulatory power. The second event occurred in 2000, when StarLink corn, a type of corn that was only approved for consumption by animals, was found in taco shells in the United States (Botelho and Kurtz
3 2008). Both of these controversies led to a loss of confidence in the regulatory power of the government, which is significant to the anti-GMO movement because supporters of
GMOs often highlight the fact that numerous governments have labeled them as safe as a reason to promote their production.
While biotechnology has experienced broad success, as demonstrated by the steady increase in GM cropland across the globe, it has not achieved the level of success that was initially projected. This is in part due to the fact that since their inception, GMOs have faced backlash from the public. One reason for this involves the fact that, due to the nature of the creation of GMOs, which focuses on a single formula for agricultural success that can be applied to the Global North and South, many Southern nations have found that GMOs do not work properly in their respective climates. In addition, GMOs often require purchase of specific chemical inputs or purchase of seeds annually, which has led to hefty production costs and numerous lawsuits over intellectual property rights
(Schiffman and Robbins 2011). Many opponents of GMOs consider this privatization of agricultural knowledge to be in violation of their traditional farming methods. Some groups also fear that GMOs have the potential to contaminate non-GM crops, which could compromise organic crops and could lead to the development of “superweeds”
(Prakash 2001). In addition, for those wanting to export to countries with GMO bans, contamination would prevent them from being able to access these markets (Wu 2004).
Finally, many people fear that GMOs have potential consequences to human health, for which they have not been adequately tested. In a Eurobarometer study, only 22% of people agreed with the statement that “GM food is safe for your health and your family’s
4 health” and only 21% agreed that “GM food is safe for future generations”
(Biotechnology 2010).
Though some people state that the anti-GMO movement began around the time of the aforementioned controversies, others maintain that the opposition grew alongside the development of the technology, and was present as early as the 1970s (Schurman 2004).
A lot of the debate about GMOs orbits around the divide between the scientific and lay community/public. Scientists have criticized activists for their unease regarding the safety of GMOs, with many stating that the general person does not know enough about the science behind the technology to effectively critique it (Schurman and Munro 2010). In dealing with the safety concerns regarding GMOs, Prakash (2001) states that “we have always lived with food risks, but in the last few decades have become increasingly more adept at asking questions” (11). In other words, it is not that GMOs are necessarily more dangerous, or more or less well tested, than other forms of agricultural breeding, but rather that society is more actively involved in decisions regarding their food.
Humans have been modifying their food since the beginning of agriculture. For many centuries, this modification occurred with little to no questioning of how agriculture was impacting human health or the environment. Following the 1970s wave of protest in America and the negative experiences that some countries had with agriculture during the Green Revolution, a number of food movements began to sprout up across the world, with the anti-GMO movement representing a movement with significant reach.
While GMOs have experienced a fairly rapid expansion across the globe, some places have witnessed a backlash. Much of the European Union has been able to keep
5 GMOs out of the market. In addition, GM companies have spent a large sum of money attempting to rebrand their image, and in some cases, have dropped out of markets completely (Schurman 2004). Due to the “asynchronous approval” of GM crops across the globe, some early adopters of GM technology have incurred heavy costs in the form of a rejection of their GM exports to other countries (Stein and Rodriguez-Cerezo 2009).
All of these elements are evidence that the opposition to GMOs has achieved some level of success. The extent of this success, however, has great geographical variability.
The purpose of this research is to determine what factors allow for a successful resistance against GMO giants such as Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred International,
Syngenta, Dow Agrosciences, BASF, and Bayer. This research provides a cohesive analysis of the varying institutions and structures that either encourage social change or inhibit it, particularly in the case of changing food systems. Much information exists regarding GMO use and resulting societal responses; however, this research is usually limited to one region and looks mainly at the specifics of the local response. This study will take a global perspective in order to develop a general framework for how a society can enact change, also serving as a proxy for the study of other food-based resistance movements. A global perspective is also appropriate in this situation due to the interconnected, multilevel nature of agricultural technology.
When I began this research, I was interested in exploring the question of why the
United States has not been able to launch an anti-GMO movement that is as powerful as the movement in the European Union. As I began to do research on the topic, this question changed to take on a more global scope. The questions that will be addressed in this thesis are:
6 1. What resistance tactics are used in each country? Will countries with similar
political, economic, or cultural contexts use similar tactics?
2. How can the success of an anti-GMO movement be determined? How is this
success informed by a movement’s framing?
In the chapters that follow, I use case studies from three main countries (and additional supplementary countries) in order to answer these questions. In chapter 2, I provide a general description of the growth and resistance of GMOs that has occurred across the globe. This chapter looks into how GMOs have become so widespread, and considers some of the main resistance tactics that have been employed in each country’s anti-GMO movement. Chapter 3 looks at the use of the small-scale agriculturalist/ food sovereignty frame throughout a number of national movements. In this chapter, I use seven national cases in which this frame was used in order to determine why the small- scale agriculturalist/ food sovereignty frame has been so effective. After these initial chapters, three core content chapters follow, which include the tactic case studies. These chapters discuss the labeling tactic, with the United States as a main case study, the banning tactic, with Mexico as a main case study, and the direct action tactic, with France as a main case study. Finally, in the conclusion, I discuss some of the overall themes that can be taken from this research, and make a projection for the United States’ experience with the anti-GMO and other food movements.
Literature Review
Within this thesis, I engage with three main bodies of literature: food politics, social movement theory, and globalization theory. As a food movement itself, the anti-
GMO movement can be described in terms of previous food movements, and can provide
7 additional information on current and future food movements. Looking into the history of food politics allows for this comparison. Social movement theory is a useful tool to look at some of the specifics behind how and why activists protest the way that they do.
Globalization theory is significant to this study because it deals with many of the power relations that led to the development of the anti-GMO movement. All of these theories will be discussed in general terms, as well as in terms of how they specifically apply to the anti-GMO movement.
Food Politics
Since the 1830s, Americans have been actively engaged in movements aimed at ensuring the safety and honesty of food (Haydu 2012). What stemmed from a desire for increased transparency in food production brought on by cases of harmful ingredients secretly added to food has since taken on a number of forms (Haydu 2012). Food movements have been driven by a variety of motivations, including moral, economic, environmental, social, and health and safety. While some movements have resulted in successful outcomes, such as the passing of the 1906 Food and Drug Act, efforts to change the conventional methods of supplying food face many obstacles that limit their success (Haydu 2012). Challenging consumer values, as well as varying corporate and government interests, requires a difficult overhaul of the status quo.
Concerns over the industrial food system have led to a food movement that is
“one of the most important social movements of the early twenty-first century in the global north” (Morgan 2009:343). Many concerns have been nutritionally based, with growing amounts of people facing hunger, nutritional deficiencies, or obesity-related illness. Others have involved issues of economic inequality, with poor countries fearing
8 biopiracy and lack of power in decision-making processes. Labor concerns have centered on the poor working conditions that farmers often face. Final concerns regard the practices involved in industrial agriculture, which have been argued to have led to pollution, loss of biodiversity, increasing dependence on chemical inputs, increasing monocultures, and a number of other environmentally negative outcomes (Levkoe 2011).
Food politics often appears around the concept of “ethical” or “sustainable” food systems. When considering what constitutes “ethical” food, the consensus tends to be that foods can have ethically positive attributes, such as being organic, fair trade, local, or sustainable, and ethically negative attributes, such as being genetically modified or being infused with hormones, antibiotics, or additives (Lang 2010). What constitutes ethical food can vary according to changing conceptions of good and bad, and is hard to anticipate due to the gap that exists between a person’s attitudes and actions (Lang 2010).
In addition, ethical food choices often come with a higher cost, and can be criticized for the ways in which their created standards of worth privilege certain groups of people that can afford to modify their lifestyles, thereby reinforcing social hierarchies (Haydu 2011).
However, this is not always the case, as in examples of movements such as the Grahamite food movement, in which the restriction of diet to only those foods seen as pure and natural was seen as an equal opportunity way to gain access into the middle class (Haydu
2011).
Legislation is beginning to coalesce around the idea of access to sustainable food; however, this legislation is often vague and does not deal completely with production issues such as the proper role of technology in the creation of food. The food sector is made up of a large quantity of subsystems including production, processing, distribution,
9 marketing, consumption, and disposal, and could benefit from a life-cycle analysis of the many ways that each level impacts society (Haugen 2008). In the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, it is stated that food policy should focus on improving food production, conservation, and distribution by establishing a regime of reform centered around making use of science and technology, developing or cultivating agricultural systems, and propagating knowledge relating to proper nutrition (Haugen
2008). However, it is important when striving to enact food policy to keep in mind the importance of access to food. Also, a technology-based solution disregards the skeptical nature of many people toward scientific solutions, as evidenced by the organic food movement, in which proponents abjured the expert opinions of conventional agriculture in favor of more traditional methods, taking an anti-science perspective (Haydu 2011).
One of the most famous examples of food politics within United States’ history is the farm worker movement that occurred in opposition to the poor working conditions of farm workers in the 1960s. Led by the Agricultural Workers Organization Committee
(AWOC) and the National Farm Workers Association (AFWA), farm workers employed a number of resistance tactics such as strikes, boycotts, hunger strikes, and marches in order to protest a lot of agricultural conventions of the time such as poor wages, improper treatment, misuse of the bracero workers program, and overuse of damaging pesticides
(Lammers 2004). This food movement represented both social and environmental issues that arose from agricultural practices of the time. The movement, known as La Causa, was able to raise wages, develop a union, and cause millions of consumers to boycott grapes (Lammers 2004).
10 The literature on other food policy movements is vast and includes movements for right to access, the farm-to-table movement, the organic movement, and the local movement. While many of these movements center around the conception that people should make conscious consumer decisions, some argue that good consumerism does not exactly equal good citizenship, and that this notion reinforces “the idea that social change is simply a matter of individual will rather than something that must be organized and struggled over in collectivities” (Allen and Guthman 2006:412 qtd. in Carolan 2011:144).
Despite this critique, a number of alternative food initiatives have been created, which fight against aspects of the large-scale, industrialized food system and promote new food practices that encourage social justice, ecological sustainability, community health, and democracy (Levkoe 2011). Levkoe addresses all of these ideas in his theory of transformative food politics, which places an emphasis on a whole-system food approach and a “politics of reflexive localization” (2011:690). When it comes to recreating the industrial food system, Winonah Hauter argues that society must demand a functional market, work to restructure the Farm Bill, increase access to healthy food, use legal methods, and begin to think of food as a “global commons” (2012:307).
The realm of food policy and debates is directly applicable to the study of GMO adoption because GMOs are food commodities. Similar to other food-related consumer decisions, a person can influence the practices of the national food system in regards to
GMO production. The Farm Worker Movement has direct applications to the anti-GMO movement in that it draws on the successes of past movements, makes use of a number of the same resistance tactics, and has the goal of an overhaul of the conventional method of agricultural production. Concerns over the use of GMOs, including labor, economic,
11 health, and environmental concerns, can be addressed at any stage in the production chain.
The anti-GMO movement is a particularly interesting food movement because it has far-reaching consequences. Agricultural production is very globally interconnected, and a country’s decision to promote or reject GMOs could lead to international consequences. For instance, it has been argued that many countries in the Global South have rejected GMOs due to fears that genetic contamination could hinder their trading relations with the EU. When considering whether to accept GMOs, the issue of national
(or local) food sovereignty is often considered. For many groups, the promotion of GM agriculture represents a shift from local, traditional agricultural methods to international, technological solutions. This switch could have potential negative impacts on the local culture, economy, and environment.
The final issue that links the anti-GMO movement to an overall food politics theme is the idea of what is considered “good food.” To some people, GMOs can be considered good food because they are high yielding and have the potential to provide novel characteristics that traditional agriculture does not offer. To others, GMOs represent a perversion of nature that has far-reaching environmental and social impacts.
The dispute over what can be considered good food is at the heart of the anti-GMO debate.
Social Movements
Social movements involve the combined efforts of individuals, groups, and organizations to achieve a political goal (Gregory et al. 2009). They are said to arise for a number of reasons, including the need to recreate norms in society and to bridge the gap
12 between expectations and experiences in daily life (Gregory et al. 2009). Hypothesized to be the expression of a “grievance,” “conviction of wrong,” or “injustice,” social movements often target institutions and structures within society (Opp 2009). Four popular mobilization methods include direct action, lobbying and litigation, education and awareness, and direct service (Reisner 2001:1394).
Social movements are considered to be social in that they require collective action. Movements target a goal that is generally unable to be accomplished by an individual, and therefore requires the action of a group. A collective identity can be produced when a group of people shares a common identity, a common goal, or a common method of protest (Chesters and Welsh 2011). Collective action occurs when people sharing a common identity work together to obtain a common good (Opp 2009). It can include professional or participatory action, as well as conventional or disruptive action (Diani 1997 in Purdue 2000).
Resource mobilization theory (RMT), a common theory in the social movement discipline, deals with the ways in which movements are able to successfully mobilize
(Chesters and Welsh 2011). This theory differs from others in that it is not as concerned with why people are protesting, but instead chooses to look at how people are protesting.
Focusing on three main areas of social movements-participation, organization, and political success-RMT pays attention to how society limits or encourages movements, as well as how each movement depends on other outside forces (Chesters and Welsh 2011).
Under RMT, a movement is thought to be successful if it can successfully mobilize the resources at its disposal.
13 Central to RMT are political opportunity structures (POS), or political changes that impact movement success, are important aspects of social movements (Opp 2009).
These structures can either constrain or encourage collective action (Chesters and Welsh
2011). Sydney Tarrow, a prominent proponent of POS, states that “contention increases when people gain the external resources to escape their compliance and find opportunities with which to use them” (Tarrow 1998:71 qtd. in Chesters and Welsh 2011:136).
Collective action will be encouraged or discouraged depending upon the geographical, political, and temporal context of the movement (Chesters and Welsh 2011). Activity within a movement can also fluctuate, experiencing periods of increased and decreased activity. This is known as a protest wave (Valocchi 2010).
New social movement (NSM) theory is another theoretical framework that is used to consider social movements. Contrary to RMT, NSM focuses on why movements occur. In particular, NSM looks at constituencies, values, and forms of action (Chesters and Welsh 2011). The “new” in new social movements refers mainly to the type of person that is active in this movement. Rather than protesting in order to obtain basic needs, NSM activists protest changes caused by modernity, industrialization, and capitalism (Chesters and Welsh 2011). In addition to the actors, new can also refer to the novel issues and methods that are employed by the movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Within social movements, one of the main goals of activist groups is the production of knowledge related to their grievance. Activists therefore create a rhetoric that they hope will be picked up by policy makers and the public. It has been stated that in order for a movement to obtain success, this rhetoric needs to be plausible (Gordon and
14 Jasper 1996). In addition, the more global the rhetoric is, the less likely the movement is to be considered a special interest or “Not In My BackYard” (NIMBY) case (Gordon and
Jasper 1996). This knowledge-production process is also known as cognitive praxis
(Chesters and Welsh 2011). Within a movement, praxes have six persuasive goals: 1) transforming perceptions of reality; 2) altering self-perceptions of protestors; 3) legitimizing the movement; 4) prescribing courses of action; 5) mobilizing; and 6) sustaining the movement (Fox and Frye 2010:425). Praxes can be cosmological, technological, or organizational (Chesters and Welsh 2011).
Knowledge production within social movements is particularly important when developing a frame or narrative. A narrative helps establish what issues will be included in the movement, as well as how the organizations involved will interpret the issues
(Reisner 2001). Social movements generally apply three frames: the diagnostic frame, which states the problems that have been experienced, the prognostic frame, which states a potential solution for the problem, and a legitimizing frame, which establishes a moral basis for the movement (Reisner 2001).
Thus a valuable way to examine social movements is to look at collective action frames, which include what the problem is, who is impacted, and what actions should be taken (Haydu 2012). Organizations’ participation in a movement is determined by how relevant the movement’s narrative is to that of the organization, as well as how likely the issue is to affect the constituents of the organization (Reisner 2001). Framing is a critical part of social movements because it allows the organization bodies to recruit other groups by demonstrating the parallelism of the two groups’ central core of beliefs and concerns
(the narrative). In some cases, frame brokerage is used to create a “master frame” so that
15 separate groups can share a “common language” that promotes a sense of cohesion between multiple groups (Haydu 2011:464). Through diffusion and transposition, scripts or schemas can even be used to apply institutional vernacular to social movements and vice versa (Haydu 2011). While frames can vary in their content, it is important that they remain relatively ambiguous. This allows for easier application to a multitude of organizations and leaves room for listeners to “fill in the blanks” with their own personal beliefs (Haydu 2012:100).
One frame commonly used in commodity-related movements is political consumerism. This method relies on consumers to make purchasing decisions based on the stance of their social movement. This allows for the driving down of the market demand for products that are opposed in the movement (Haydu 2011). In this method, movement leaders fulfill the important role of educating the public about how to consume according to the standards of the coalition (Haydu 2012). However, as stated previously, there is debate over whether this method is able to truly change the system and represent society as a whole.
Other social movements tactics include the use of thinking work, counter-experts, and legitimation stripping. “Thinking work” is the process of obtaining and analyzing a large quantity of information from a variety of sources in order to generate new ideas regarding the topic (Schurman and Munro 2010). This is a form of knowledge production that contrasts the hegemonic knowledge base. Counter-experts, or people who have a large amount of knowledge regarding a topic, but who take a stance opposing the main position on that topic, are significant to a movement because they challenge the concept that the dominant stance on an issue is the only one held by experts (Purdue 2000).
16 Counter-experts have been frequently used in the anti-GMO movement. Finally, legitimation stripping is the removal of the legitimacy of the leading group, and is often completed by drawing media attention to the violent punishment of activists (Purdue
2000).
Social movements are very closely related to the actors that comprise them.
Actors are important to the movement because they are responsible for “[framing] the issues to be addressed, [drawing] limits to these issues, and [prioritizing] within the range of issues” (Purdue 2000:59). Main actors in a movement can be considered on a number of scales, including local, state, national, multinational, or global. The extent to which activists make use of theory when determining the best strategy has been highly debated within the literature. While some argue that activists do not make conscious decisions based on theory, others believe that activist leaders looking for a “definitive answer” will choose whatever strategy is most likely to provide success (Jasper 2004). Actors are often said to choose arenas of protest based on which will lead to the most effective use of their particular resources (Jasper 2004).
Conceptualizing the relative success or failure of a movement can be an arduous, involved, and sometimes fruitless endeavor. One method of defining success is suggested in The Strategy of Social Protest, in which acceptance of a movement as legitimate and production of advantages are divided into four potential outcomes: full response, which includes gains and acceptance and is considered a success; pre-emption, which includes gains but no acceptance; co-optation, which includes acceptance but no gains; and collapse, which includes neither acceptance nor gains, and is considered a failure (Saeed
17 2009). Success can also be divided into levels of responsiveness of access, agenda, policy, output, impact, and structure (Saeed 2009:4).
The study of social movements is applicable to the study of GMOs because the anti-GMO movement is considered a social movement. While the methods may differ, in the anti-GMO movement the protesters take on a similar goal and identity, thereby creating an opportunity for collective action. Resource mobilization theory can be used in this context to address the question of how people were able to effectively mobilize the resources at their disposal. In other words, it can look at what political opportunity structures caused the localized movement to achieve success. New social movement theory can be used to address what aspects in society caused the need for such a movement to emerge.
As will be argued in this paper, the various anti-GMO movements have made use of a number of different frames when discussing the GMO issue. In the cases considered in this paper, framing has been an important way to legitimize activist action, especially in the case of direct action. In the anti-GMO movement, frames can be considered in order to develop a better understanding of the goals of each sub-movement, as well as the qualifications that are necessary for the movement to be considered a success. Social movement theory helps to investigate what movement success looks like in resulting social, legal, and political changes.
Globalization
Globalization is one of the most hotly debated concepts used to describe the contemporary world. Many take an economic understanding, stating that globalization is a process in which “markets, firms, production, and national systems are integrated on a
18 global scale,” where countries gain interdependency due to increased trade (Brawley
2003:12-13). The Dictionary of Social Sciences refers to globalization as “a catch-all term for expansion of diverse forms of economic, political, and cultural activity beyond national borders” (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006:13). Other definitions bring up ideas of modernization, development, capitalism, or a sense of “time-space compression” (David
Harvey 1999). Critiques of popular definitions often discuss the lack of consideration of non-economic globalization, including the more cultural forms (Brawley 2003).
However, the four main institutional aspects of globalization include the world capitalist economy, the nation-state system, the world military order, and the international division of labor (Bombongan 2004).
Within the study of globalization, there is a conception that there has been a shift from government to governance. The power of national governments has been limited both by the rising importance of international organizations and agreements and by the increasing power that citizens have to guide the development of public policy (Peters and
Pierre 1998). Peters and Pierre (1998) have summarized this development by stating “it appears that whatever the State does it does poorly, while the private sector (for profit and not for profit) is more effective” (225). This can have important implications for regulation within countries, as well as for the potential impacts that a movement such as the anti-GMO movement can achieve.
Relationships within globalization can also be conceived of as far as the upscaling or downscaling of practices and protest. In many ways, the anti-globalization struggle represents a contestation of the upscaling of production methods, business models, and interactions to a more global scale. However, many protest groups have engaged in
19 similar attempts at upscaling in order to obtain a more globally connected activist community. This activist upscaling can be beneficial, but can also lead to a disconnect with more localized (downscaled) activist issues. Citizens and activists impacted by globalization may feel that their identities are being deterritorialized as relations become more global, and respond by attempting to re-territorialize or re-identify with their national or local environment.
The study of globalization has produced a number of different theories regarding whether globalization is a more destructive, passive, or progressive force. Modernization theory focuses on the proposed “progressive” development of societies from traditional to modern (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006). Walter Rostow divides this development even further into stages of traditional society, preconditions for takeoff, takeoff, drive to maturity, and high mass consumption (Warf 2010). This development involves the transmission of ideas, values, institutions, and technologies, and leads to the ultimate goal of a more “Western” society (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006). This theory translates directly to the goals of globalization, but has received much criticism for its ethnocentric viewpoint, and is countered by dependency theory.
Dependency theory rejects the idea that certain countries are at the beginning phases of modernization, and instead proposes that they have been hindered by the exploitation of more developed countries during their rise to power (Putnam 2010). This theory, stemming from experiences of underdevelopment in Latin American countries, states that within global society, countries are broken up into core and periphery, and that the relationship built between the two has resulted in the periphery being dependent on the core (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006). Immanuel Wallerstein built off of this idea in his
20 capitalist world-system approach, which states that the core, periphery, and semi- periphery experience unequal exchange, and that this exchange should be studied in a whole system approach (Bombongan 2004).
In the debate over what globalization is, Matthew Sparke has provided three widespread myths of globalization: the myth of newness, the myth of inevitability, and the myth of leveling (Sparke 2013). The myth of newness has implications for the extent to which globalization is seen as a new and uncertain global event. Traditionalists argue that increasing global interconnectedness has been occurring for centuries, and that what is commonly referred to as “globalization” is just the latest stage. Conversely, globalists believe that globalization is a new and significant occurrence, which has the ability to bring considerable change to global social relations (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006). How a person feels about the relative newness of globalization will also impact how he or she feels about the risks associated with this phenomenon.
The myth of inevitability relates to the extent to which globalization is seen as an unavoidable outcome. This argument concerns the belief that if globalization is inevitable, then countries are only harming their potential future by rejecting the practices associated with this phenomenon. Carl Pope of the Sierra Club rejected this assumption of inevitability by stating:
Inevitable forces in society do not require 3,000 page treaties to make them
happen. Inevitable forces do not depend on suppressed public dialogue and
parliamentary tricks to move them along. They don’t depend on elaborate
exemptions from the normal rules of social life to take place. (Qtd. in Sparke
2013)
21 During the promotion of GMOs, this same idea of inevitability has been promoted.
Proponents of the technology have proposed its inevitability in the face of a vastly growing population and opponents have lamented the inevitability of contamination of conventional crops by GMOs.
The final myth, the myth of leveling, relates to the ability of global expansion to create a more level playing field. The idea behind this is that, as companies, interactions, and technology spread across the globe, increasing numbers of people will have the ability to tap into “global commonalities” that will ultimately provide a better standard of living (Sparke 2013:36). In many cases, globalization has not led to this proposed leveling, and in some cases, it has even led to a greater disparity between nations. In the case of GMOs, genetic engineering has been proposed as a way to “level” countries’ abilities to cultivate high yielding varieties of crops.
Ulrich Beck, a strong proponent of the “risk society” theory, believes that society is currently part of a “runaway world” in which “ominous dangers, military conflicts, and environmental hazards… [cause] increasing portions of our everyday lives [to be] spent negotiating change, dealing with uncertainty and assessing the personal impacts of situations that appear to be out of our control” (Mythen 2004:1). This new set of risks has been produced by the changes that come with modernization, scientific and technological progress, and the transformation of the role of the state in global society (el-Ojeili and
Hayden 2006). With the increase in available information has come an increase in competing conceptions over what constitutes a “risk,” as well as the development of social institutions as an actor in the process of risk-construction (Mythen 2004). In addition, with the increase of interconnectedness brought by globalization, society is
22 increasingly able to discuss risk in a “deterritorialized” fashion, in which multiple nations are seen as parties to a “global community of fate” (Beck 2002:42).
Those critical of the progress that is alleged to come from globalization fear that global society is instead engaging in a “race to the bottom,” particularly in relation to environmental, labor, and other regulatory standards (Brawley 2003:15). With this comes the fear that globalization will lead to deindustrialization, unemployment, inequality, and social unrest (Brawley 2003). Furthermore, many fear that the distance between those making decisions and those who will be impacted by decisions is increasing, leading to a
“democratic deficit,” in which intergovernmental organizations such as the WTO are taking on increasingly larger roles (Brawley 2003:51). A final fear includes the potential risks brought on by the increasing use of technology, which is often seen as an
“unstoppable force” with the power to control economic and political choices (Brawley
2003:24).
Whether positive or not, globalization has led to a number of changes to the political, cultural, and economic functioning of the world. Anthony Giddens argues that globalization “pulls, pushes, and squeezes sideways,” creating a “fuzzier” role for the nation-state in global affairs (Bombongan 2004:51). It pulls powers away from the nation-state, pushes down on the nation-state to create new local identities, and squeezes sideways to create “new economic and cultural regions” (Bombongan 2004:51). This decreased power of the state has led to a situation in which “the global becomes the national and vice-versa” (Andrew Baker qtd. in Brawley 2003:49). Some argue that this has allowed for the creation of a global consciousness, in which many nations are able to speak about the effects of the same issue (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006).
23 Relating to this idea of risk is the idea that globalization has led to what is known as a “post-traditional society,” in which all nations are part of one global society
(Bombongan 2004:54). A consequence of this has been an attack on traditional ideas where “tradition more and more must be contemplated, defended, sifted through, in relation to the awareness that there exists a variety of other ways of doing things”
(Anthony Giddens qtd. in Bombongan 2004:54). In other words, in order to resist being classified as “fundamentalist” and unable to accept change, one must exercise social reflexivity and engage in a debate over the merits of one’s traditional practices in relation to other available options (Bombongan 2004).
The presence of numerous proposed or realized threats of globalization has led to the emergence of an anti-globalization movement. Rather than one homogenous movement, many see the anti-globalization movement as being comprised of many smaller movements. Also conceptualized as the anti-capitalist movement, the anti- neoliberal movement, or the alternative globalization movement, the anti-globalization movement can target expansion of globalization and capitalist ideas as a whole or the specific globalization behaviors that are currently dominant (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006).
Specific instances of anti-globalization behavior include the Zapatista movement in
Mexico, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), and the 1999 Battle of
Seattle (Eschle and Maiguashca 2005). José Bové, a leading anti-globalization activist, has argued against the privileging of the economic “at the expense of the political, of regulation, and of the public interest” (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006:192). Another group,
ATTAC, seeks to “reconquer space lost by democracy to the sphere of finance; to oppose any new abandonment of national sovereignty on the pretext of the ‘rights’ of investors
24 and merchants; [and] to create a democratic space at the global level” (el-Ojeili and
Hayden 2006:193).
There are various internal debates that are key to this movement. The first regards whether to rely on more traditional or direct action techniques when mobilizing against globalization. The second concerns whether to try to disrupt the system from within or without. The third deals with how social movements relate to the role of politics and the state. Finally, there is consideration of the benefits of a more local or global technique and what the desired outcome of the movement should be (el-Ojeili and Hayden 2006).
With the increase in globalization, many have began to wonder what the role of institutions should be. The role that institutions are capable of in global debates depends on whether or not they are considered to have moral agency, or the ability to make decisions based on ethical dilemmas and act on said decisions (Erskine 2003). Institutions can fall under this category because they have “the capacity for purposive action”
(Keohane qtd. in Erskine 2003:6). This concept is significant because if an institution is considered to have moral agency, it is expected to act, and is consequently held responsible for the results of its actions (Erskine 2003). Collective moral agents such as institutions sometimes have the opportunity to act with greater power than single individuals, and often serve as representatives of cross-territorial interests in negotiations
(Betsill and Corell 2008). Therefore, international and national non-governmental organizations can become important players in anti-globalization debates.
The anti-globalization movement has had a large impact on the ideas and methods of the anti-GMO movement. Whether a person sees the propagation of more Western, industrialized agricultural techniques as a positive or negative event will depend largely
25 on his or her opinion of globalization. The idea of a risk society is important to the study of GMOs because technology is seen as a potentially unstoppable force, which has the power to greatly change the physical, social, and economic realms. Many activists protest the technology as a way to negotiate change in a manner that they feel comfortable with.
For example, activists pushing for a temporary ban of GMOs are responding to a need for more time to consider the risks involved with the technology.
Central to this argument is the attack on traditional techniques in agriculture. For many proponents of GM technology, the fact that a society would choose more traditional methods when more modern, technologically advanced methods are available is inconceivable. In this understanding, GMO proponents are taking a modernization theory approach to the understanding of agriculture, in which development is seen as a continuum from traditional to technological production methods. However, activists are acting largely in opposition to the globalization, or industrialization, of agriculture. In addition to the fear of the loss of the traditional is a fear of the loss of the power of the state. This analysis will consider how much power a nation is capable of executing in the control of GM technology.
Methodology
This research was based on a discourse or textual analysis that was informed by social movement theory, food politics, and globalization theory. In the initial phase of research for this paper, a basic analysis of journals, newspaper articles, publications, government and agency websites, and social media was completed in order to create an inventory of protest activity. The information compiled in this step was entered into an
Excel spreadsheet, and tactics were coded from their original, more specific form into
26 general resistance tactic categorical groupings. For instance, a situation of destruction of
GM soya and maize in France would be coded as direct action. The completion of this phase resulted in the production of five general categories of resistance tactics: destruction/ direct action, court action, labeling, banning, and other forms of protest, as well as an “other” category. The “other” category is a combination of multiple tactics that were not large enough to constitute their own group within this study.
Appendix A provides a graphic demonstrating of how coding was completed. A few examples are provided for each protest tactic to show how the information was coded from more detailed to more general. The Wordle provided below the coding table gives a general understanding of how this coding transformed into a collection of the people, tactics, areas, and key words that would be focused on in this research.
Information regarding GMO crop growth was obtained from the International
Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA). In looking at all of the publications that have been provided by ISAAA since the commercialization of GM agriculture, I was able to create spreadsheets and graphs showing the GMO growth patterns and characteristics for each of the thirty-six countries that have been listed as producing GMOs. This information was used to determine general patterns, and later to provide context for the agricultural situation in each country.
Information on each country of interest’s general characteristics was entered into a separate Excel file. This information fell into eight categories: geography, social, political, economic, health, education/ technology, environment, and agriculture/ GMO.
Statistics were obtained from the CIA World Factbook, Word Bank Statistics, ISAAA, and a variety of other similar sources for the countries that were listed by the ISAAA as
27 having grown GMOs in the past. This spreadsheet was used to provide context and statistics for each country’s case study chapter.
Once the initial research phase was completed, the data were analyzed in order to choose three case studies, as well as a number of lesser cases, for a more detailed analysis. The main case studies were chosen based on which countries appeared multiple times in my initial analysis, which ones were listed as having achieved some level of change, and which seemed like they would provide enough information for an adequate evaluation. Because I was unable to travel to many of the locations that I was studying, it was important to choose locations that were covered enough by newspaper articles, activist websites, and social media to provide a detailed enough picture of the movement.
Movements were also chosen based on their general geographic location because I wanted to cover as much of the continental variation as possible.
This process led to the choosing of the United States, France, and Mexico as the three main case studies. All three of these movements were heavily documented in multiple forms of media. Both France and Mexico were suggested as being the tactical inspiration for other local manifestations of the anti-GMO movement. The United States was chosen because I have the most familiarity and context to provide to that location as a US citizen, and because, while it has not had a significantly successful movement so far, it has depended heavily on a labeling resistance tactic. In each of these countries, the national anti-GMO movements made use of multiple tactics, but were chosen to represent the tactic with which they most actively promoted or were most associated.
Using the initial data that were created, I chose a number of national comparison cases to relate to the larger case studies. Theses comparison cases were used somewhat in
28 the case study chapters, but were also used to demonstrate the promotion of the small- scale agriculturalist frame throughout the movement. The study areas of interest can be seen in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Study Areas of Interest
This study relied on a case study methodology, in which countries were used to show some of the global variance in resistance tactics and narratives. This study was therefore unable to look at the movements that occur in every country. Also, even though an attempt was made to capture as much of the internal activist variation as possible, I made the decision to focus on a few key activist groups that I saw to contribute to the main tactic the most rather than try to look at every group that exists in the country. This case study method causes this analysis to be lacking in statistically based quantitative analysis, but it provides a rich, context-laden report of a few key movements, which could be applied to other countries’ movements.
29 When studying each case, I looked for characteristics such as main actors in the movement, specific implementation of the tactic, and public opinion of the activists.
Generally, I focused in on one or two activist groups that made use of the tactic and searched through their websites and other social media as a way to determine how they framed their position. I also made use of newspaper articles to look for quotations from main activists demonstrating their rationale for their activist behavior. Similar to the technique that is employed in interviewing, I would say that I used a “snowball” technique for searching for movement information. I started with a few key journal articles, and used these to pick out new sources and specific content that I would look for in other articles, news stories, or websites. A lot of times, articles would make reference to other countries that employed a similar method. This was the main way that I was able to pick out specific actors such as the Confédération Paysanne.
Because I was interested in looking at success of the movements, I developed a framework that would lead to a qualitative understanding of local success. This framework concerned the frames and goals that were developed by each activist group, which would later lead to the qualification of success. Frames were determined by looking at the activist websites and statements made by activists in order to determine what aspect of GMOs they were protesting. Goals for each group were informed by the frame and tactic that they were associated with. For example, many Mexican activists used an anti-contamination frame and pushed for a moratorium of GM maize. This action led to the determination that the activists had the goal of keeping GM maize out of the country (temporarily or permanently). Success was then determined based on whether the activists had achieved their goals, as defined by the frames that they have promoted.
30 Although the specific characteristics varied for each country, I looked for a few key elements when researching each national movement. Some of these elements included the country’s opinion of science and technology, their history of protest, the significance of their food culture, the conceptions of risk that they identified with, and the regulatory documents bodies that were in place in each location. By using similar characteristics, I was able to do a cross-country comparison.
31 Chapter 2: Current State of GMO Growth and Resistance
In the latest edition of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-
Biotech Applications (ISAAA), it states that there are currently 28 countries growing GM crops. This list includes ten “Biotech Mega-Countries,” or countries growing more than
1,000,000 hectares of GMOs, eight countries falling in the range of 50,000 to 1,000,000 hectares, and ten countries growing less than 50,000 hectares of GMOs (James 2012:13).
These countries can be seen in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Global Growth of GMOs Per Country
Source: James, C. (2012). Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2012. ISAAA Brief No. 44. Ithaca, NY: ISAAA.
32 From their commercial beginnings in 1996, GMOs have experienced 17 years of stable growth. This has produced an increase of almost 100 times the initial yield, with global area increasing from approximately 1.7 million hectares in 1996 to the current value of 170.3 million. In addition, there has not been a single year since 1996 that GMO cropland has decreased from the previous year. Many see this continuing increase in adoption as a sign of growing acceptance of the technology around the world. However, when looking at the increase in yield, there appears to be no significant increase between years. Rather, the rate of growth appears to be relatively stable in terms of amount of hectares from year to year (James 2012).
GM technology is often criticized as being technology that is focused on the
Global North. This is most likely due to its reputation for experiencing less success in the
Global South. When looking at the growth of GM cropland in the developing and industrial world, it appears as though both have had a steady increase in cropland devoted to GMOs. From 1996-1998, industrial countries obtained an increasingly larger share of the global percentage of GMOs, while developing countries’ portions continued to decrease. After 1998, the divide between the two started to lessen, and actually experienced a shift in 2011, when developing countries overtook industrial countries for the largest percent of global GMO crop growth. This development can be seen in Figure
3. Looking specifically at 2012, 48 percent of global GMO growth came from industrial countries, and 52 percent came from developing countries. Only two of the ten “Biotech
Mega-Countries,” the United States and Canada, are considered to be industrial countries.
It may be too soon to see whether this trend of increase in the developing world will
33 continue, but the current trend favors production in developing countries over industrial.
(James 2012)
Figure 3: Developing vs. Industrial GM Growth (% of Total)
Source: Adapted from James, C. (2012). Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2012. ISAAA Brief No. 44. Ithaca, NY: ISAAA.
In the first year of commercial development, 1996, six countries grew GM crops.
These early adopters included the United States, China, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and Mexico. In the early years of GMO adoption, countries from North and South
America, Asia, and Australia all took part in the technology, demonstrating a lack of apparent geographic pattern to early adoption. Many years experienced a growth of three countries (1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2010), with some years experiencing little to no growth in countries (1997, 2007, and 2012 each had no additional countries entering the market), and 2008 experiencing the addition of 5 countries (Egypt, Poland, Chile,
34 Burkina Faso, Bolivia). The year of first entry into the GMO market per country is listed in Table 1. Although this is the year of first commercialization of GMOs within a country, some countries experienced gap years where they had no reported GMO growth.
The growth patterns of the three case studies (USA, Mexico, France) can be found in
Appendix B.
Table 1: First Year of GMO Commercialization Per Country Year Countries Experiencing First Year of GM Technology Adoption 1996 USA, China, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Mexico 1997 1998 France, South Africa, Spain 1999 Portugal, Romania, Ukraine 2000 Uruguay, Bulgaria, Germany 2001 Indonesia 2002 Colombia, Honduras, India 2003 Brazil, Philippines 2004 Paraguay 2005 Czech Republic, Iran 2006 Slovakia 2007 2008 Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Chile, Egypt, Poland 2009 Costa Rica 2010 Myanmar, Pakistan, Sweden 2011 Sudan, Cuba Source: Adapted from ISAAA Data from Brief No. 5 through No. 44, Clive James, 2012
Transgenic tobacco and tomatoes were some of the earliest developed GM products. However, since the beginning of GMO cultivation, four crops have stood out as being the main focus of GMO production: soybeans, maize, cotton, and canola. Of these
35 four, soybeans have consistently occupied the greatest percentage of GMO development, holding approximately 47 percent of the market in 2012 and peaking at 63 percent of the market in 2001 (James 2012). This number accounts for 93 percent of all of the soy produced in the United States, and around 98 percent of the soy produced in Argentina
(Crops: Soybeans 2008). Also of note is the high percentage (82%) of corn that is genetically modified in the United States (Kelly 2012). Sugarbeets, alfalfa, squash, potato, and papaya have also been growing in frequency in recent years, but still represent a large share of GMO growth (Shelton, Zhao, and Roush 2002).
GM soybean production is particularly significant in Latin America, where two out of the three largest producers—Argentina and Brazil—reside. These two countries grow a combined total of 44.1 million hectares of transgenic soybeans, with Brazil making up a slightly greater share of production (James 2012). Other GM soybean producers in that region include Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, Mexico, Chile, and Costa
Rica (James 2012). This expansion of soy production has led to a lot of negative environmental, social, and economic impacts in this region, including deforestation and land and water degradation, the loss of small farms, and the loss of food sovereignty
(Garcia-López and Arizpe 2010).
Of all of the traits that have been promoted in GM agriculture, herbicide tolerance has been the most successful. Herbicide tolerance, currently accounting for 59 percent of global GM growth, has been used for maize, canola, sugarbeet, cotton, alfalfa, and soybean. Herbicide tolerant soybeans are considered the most dominant biotech crop, according to ISAAA. In the United States, soybean, cotton, and canola resistance to glyphosate have steady increased since their inception, and currently represent a large
36 share of the market (Duke 2005). Insect resistance, or Bt resistance, accounts for a large share of GM traits as well. This trait is especially important for cotton plants, which generally require the largest amount of insecticide, and maize (Shelton, Zhao, and Roush
2002). Because of the high risk of insects developing a resistance to the toxin Bacillus thurengiensis, farmers are often required to plant areas of “refuge” with non-Bt resistant crops (Que et al. 2010). Finally, the use of stacked traits has been steadily increasing throughout time. Stacking most generally makes use of herbicide tolerance and insect resistance traits (Que et al. 2010). Stacked traits maize is considered the second most dominant GM crop, with a global growth of 39.9 million hectares (James 2012).
It is important to keep in mind that the numbers represented by the ISAAA mainly represent the quantity of GMOs that are officially grown in each country, and do not fully take into account the unauthorized growth of GMOs in many countries. These unauthorized seeds are often referred to as “stealth seeds,” and have gained popularity in countries such as India and Brazil (Herring 2007). Many criticize the use of these seeds because they can undermine the efforts to regulate a growing biotech industry in a country. M.S. Swaminathan echoed this sentiment by stating that “illegal proliferation of
GM varieties must cease or else the bio-safety regulations will be rendered meaningless”
(Herring 2007:137).
Often the choice between going with stealth seeds or regulated seeds comes down to whether someone places a higher value on low cost or greater reliability of product.
The use of stealth seeds is also seen as a form of resistance against corporate domination of the seed market by companies such as Monsanto. In this resistance tactic, the overarching frame has to do with being against the property rights employed by
37 Monsanto rather that being strictly anti-GMO technology. Because this strain of thought differs from most of the other anti-GMO frames discussed in this paper, this resistance tactic will not be covered in greater depth.
Monsanto
Throughout the anti-GMO discussion and through the context of this paper,
Monsanto is often brought up as the main company connected to GMOs. While
Monsanto is not alone in its endeavors, it is one of the main companies that has been known to engage in activities that have led to the transformation of the agribusiness sector from one made up of many small companies to one controlled by a few, large corporations (Howard 2009). In other words, the agribusiness sector has become one dominated by an oligopoly of a few firms, namely Monsanto, Sygenta, DuPont, Bayer,
Dow, and a few others (Howard 2009).
Through this process of integration and cooperation, an industry referred to as the
“life science industry” has been created. This has led to what Campbell et al. refer to as a
“triple helix” of cooperation between universities, corporations, and government
(Campbell, Koski, and Blumenthal 2004). This process occurs in the biotechnology field due to the high cost of research and development, and the benefits to market success and lobbying power that come from aligning in a few large firms (Howard 2009). It can allow for more efficient use of technology, greater market power, and increased property rights for the corporations involved (Johnson and Melkonyan 2003). This can be a detrimental process, however, due to the fact that “when four firms control 40% of a market, it is no longer competitive” (Howard 2009:1270). This is the case in the biotechnology sector, and can lead to control by the large firms of price level and accessibility of the product.
38 In addition, it can lead to greater levels of horizontal and vertical integration of the market, in which companies such as Monsanto begin to control the research and development goals, the individual traits, the seeds, and the herbicide products (Howard
2009).
In the past, Monsanto has entered into alliances with a number of dedicated biotechnology firms and seed companies, including ArQule, Cargill International,
Cereon, Genomics, Ecogen, FT-Pesquisa e Sememtes, GeneTrace, Incyte
Pharmaceuticals, the Institute of Plant Genetics, Mendel Biotechnology, Millennium
Pharmaceutical, Mycogen (Guerrante 2010). Between 1981 and 1996, chemical and biotechnology firms such as Monsanto engaged in approximately 1,500 acquisitions, mergers, and alliances (Goldsmith 2001). In addition to working together, these companies often have control of multiple aspects of the agricultural sector, including the pesticide, seed, and transgenic seed market (Johnson and Melkonyan 2003). While
Monsanto has been particularly well known for its acquisitions and mergers, other companies have engaged in these behaviors as well. The relationship between seed, chemical, and other companies can be seen in Figure 4.
39 Figure 4: Relationship Between Seed, Chemical, and Other Companies
Source: https://www.msu.edu/~howardp/seedindustry.html
As of May 2013, Monsanto was listed as having sales of $14 billion, with a market value of $55.9 billion and a rank of 344 on Forbes’ list of the Global 2000
Leading Companies (World’s Most Innovative 2013). Monsanto was able to gain the title of largest seed corporation in 2005, when it purchased another vegetable seed company called Seminis (Mascarenhas and Busch 2006). It currently holds offices and plants in more than 50 countries around the world (Prodor 2009). Having experienced problems with a lack of transparency and with controversial products in the past, Monsanto created a pledge, in which in promises integrity, dialogue, transparency, sharing of knowledge and technology, benefits to customers and the environment, and respect of “religious, cultural, and ethical concerns,” among other promises (Our Pledge 2013). While
40 Monsanto’s status as one of the leading companies involved in biotechnology is one factor that has led it to be brought up so consistently in the anti-GMO debate, its specific tactics of acquisition, lobbying, and litigation have led it to become one of the main targets in this movement.
Monsanto has been in operation since 1901, and therefore was active in many fields before the company decided to focus its attention on the biotechnology market.
Lacking a strong base of knowledge in the field, Monsanto relied mainly on acquisitions of seeds and technology (Johnson and Melkonyan 2003). With the help of a number of scientists and other specialists in biotechnology, seed production, and pharmaceutical fields, Monsanto soon became one of the leading producers of biotechnology products
(Resetar et al. 1999). Starting in 1996, Monsanto acquired over 50 companies, including
Robert Holden’s Foundation Seeds, Asgrow Agronomics, Unilever, Maharashtra Hybrid
Seed Company, Agro Seed Corp, and many others (Robin 2010). These acquisitions involved countries such as the United States, Canada, Britain, Brazil, Argentina, India,
South Africa, Malawi, and the Philippines (Robin 2010). The total cost of the acquisitions was over $8 billion, with DeKalb Genetics Corporation, Delta & Pine Land, Cargill’s
International Seed Division, Seminis, and Holden’s Foundation Seeds representing the largest share of the cost (Robin 2010).
As stated previously, Monsanto had experienced prior difficulties with their public image, and had consequently learned ways in which they could mitigate future public relations disasters. Many times, this mitigation came in the form of lobbying, particularly lobbying for the regulation of GMOs. Lobbying provided Monsanto with a way to gain access into many levels of government and academia. Monsanto was able to
41 garner support from democratic and republican politicians, and was able to work with the
Agricultural Research Service within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (Prodor 2009).
Lobbying for regulation of GMOs provided two direct benefits for Monsanto. First, it allowed Monsanto to have a role in deciding in what way GMOs would be regulated. By being active in the process of setting the regulatory standards, the company could push for standards that better represented their own interests. Second, by pushing the government to set up standards that would deem certain GMOs “safe,” Monsanto could evade responsibility and refer to the government when the public started to question the technology (Robin 2010).
While acquisitions and lobbying allowed Monsanto to gain a place in the global life sciences market, through their use of litigation, Monsanto gained notoriety within the general public. Kneen (1999) states that Monsanto’s tactics in the promotion of its products are “aggressive, very public, very political, and very litigious” (164). Monsanto makes use of what is known as “grower agreements,” in which farmers agree to a number of conditions in order to purchase and grow Monsanto’s seeds (Goldsmith 2001:1313).
This agreement is critiqued for the way it changes the long-held tradition of seed saving, and for its provision stating that Monsanto can investigate a farm using its product if it thinks a farmer is using the seeds in a way that is not allowed by the contract (Kneen
1999).
Madeley (2000) stated that “patents are the lifeblood of multi-national corporations” (Prodor 2009:133). If this is true, Monsanto, currently holding 647 patents for GMO products, is alive and thriving (30). Due to Monsanto’s ability to gain a near monopoly on GM-techniques, as well as their success in lobbying for the patenting of
42 GMO technology, Monsanto has gained the ability to set the use terms and price of their product, and to litigate against anyone who breaks those terms. This has led to a great amount of lawsuits against farmers, with more than 90 lawsuits filed against American farmers alone (29). Of particular note is the impact that Monsanto’s conditions have on seed saving. Farmers, who have relied on saving their seeds for reuse the next year, are no longer able to engage in this practice, and face strict penalties if they do (31).
Monsanto is not the only large seed or biotech company in existence. However, a lot of its tactics, as well as its overall success in dominating the market, have allowed it to become the leading name associated with GMOs in popular discourse. Due to this fact,
Monsanto will be the main focus for the remainder of this paper.
Current Anti-GMO Movements across the Globe
The anti-GMO movement follows a rich tradition of protest, the influence of which can be seen in the framing and tactics that are often employed. While the protest of
GMOs has occurred for as long as the technology has existed, the controversy over GMO use has escalated in the past few decades. Though the scope of the movement is global, the specific manifestations of the movement have varied significantly from country to country due to the different ways that the issue resonates with the farmers and consumers in each nation. Thus rather than a singular movement, the anti-GMO movement is really a movement of many sub-movements.
It would be difficult to attempt to capture the full reach of the anti-GMO movement in one paper. It has experienced hotspots of activity in just about every continent, with heavy protest activity occurring even in countries that are seen to be generally supportive of GMOs. Some countries of note include France, the UK, USA,
43 India, Mexico, Brazil, New Zealand, Chile, and South Africa, although there are many other countries that have been active in the anti-GMO movement as well. Though it is impossible to make a general statement regarding the totality of the movement, it is possible to pull out a few of the protest events that have most intensely galvanized the public into action in order to look for the most effective use of protest tactics.
This chapter will include a brief introduction of the protest methods that will be considered in this research. Some methods, such as court action, will be covered in greater detail because they will not be considered for a full analysis in their own chapter.
Direct action, bans, and labeling will be covered briefly, as they will be addressed in full in chapters later on in this report.
The Range of Protest Methods
Much of the protest activity carried out in the anti-GMO movement falls under the general category of protest. This would include any kind of public event such as a march, a supermarket protest, a campaign, a sit-in, a rally, a hunger strike, or an internet group. These tactics have been widely used, especially within the United States, Brazil,
India, South Africa, and Britain. One of the most extensive recent examples of protest includes the March Against Monsanto, which was a joint event that occurred in 2013 in
52 countries and 436 cities (Protests Around the World, 2013). The main goal of this tactic is to draw attention to the movement and to increase the coalition willing to protest
GMOs. At the march and rally that occurred in Washington, D.C. on May 25, 2013, many protesters were calling for labeling of GMOs, for increased safety standards, and for the White House to respond to their petition. This march came in the wake of the defeat of a labeling bill in the U.S. Senate, and represents an effort to work outside of the
44 system if the institutions in place fail the movement (Protesters Around the World, 2013).
Rather than attempt to lump all protest activity into one category of study, I instead focus on the specific tactic of direct action.
Court Action
When discussing the use of court action in the anti-GMO movement, it is important to consider the legal opportunity structures (LOS) in place. Building off of the idea of political opportunity structures from social movement theory, legal opportunity structures look at the ability of activists to address their issues through the court system.
In other words, LOS concerns the level to which activists are able to mobilize through their use of the courts (De Fazio 2012). While law has the ability to draw attention to inequalities, it also “simultaneously conceals and legitimizes these inequalities beneath a neutral and professional discourse” (Kedar 2006:412, qtd. in von Benda-Beckmann
2009). Conflict resolutions are often acted out within the legal realm, providing an effective structure for social change, if the proper institutions are in place. However, legal structures can also act as the producers of power, assigning authority to people, companies, and experts (von Benda-Beckmann 2009). The LOS in place have a large impact on a movement’s ability to obtain legal mobilization.
In order to be able to make use of a legal tactic of resistance, a judicial system within a country should demonstrate certain traits, the first of which is independence. The more independent a judicial system is, the more power it has to limit the reach of the executive authority (Doherty and Hayes 2012a). Independence can vary depending on the type of judicial system in place in a country. For instance, countries that make use of a common law system, in which laws are based on case law and judicial precedent,
45 generally experience greater independence than countries relying on a civil law system
(Doherty and Hayes 2012a). In situations where citizens feel that they are unable to exercise their rights in a court system, activists may turn to more destructive or extra- institutional forms of resistance, or may challenge the institutions in place (Doherty and
Hayes 2012a).
It has been stated that legal opportunity structures are comprised of “access to courts, justiciable rights, [and] judiciary receptivity” (De Fazio 2012:6). In order to have access to courts, an activist group must have legal standing and the means to fund their case. Standing is available to people who have been personally affected by the growth of
GMOs, but can also be gained by environmental groups such as Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth if these groups can prove that they are representing the needs of their members
(Vanhala 2012). When activists make use of this option, it is referred to as associational standing (De Fazio 2012). Even if an activist group is able to achieve standing, it might not make use of legal remedies if it believes that the monetary repercussions of failure would be too great. This is often the case in environmental trials. If hoping to make use of a legal tactic of resistance, an activist group generally needs to possess robust resource capabilities (Vanhala 2012).
Once access to courts is established, an activist group must make sure that its claims are justiciable, or that they can be remedied in court. As stated by Richard Rose,
“to have a right without a remedy is to have something of a limited value” (1976:254-55).
In the case of the anti-GMO movement, an activist’s claims might be deemed justiciable if something such as a temporary or permanent injunction on the growth of GMOs would help them reclaim their rights.
46 Finally, in order to obtain success in legal mobilization, an activist group must experience judiciary receptivity. In other words, the court system must by receptive to the idea that the activist group has claims that are worthy of being resolved in court. While the first two aspects are thought to be relatively stable in each nation, judiciary receptivity is thought to change throughout time due to the political ideals of the time (De
Fazio 2012). This is of particular importance to anti-GMO movements, as the conception of how food should be governed is in a current state of flux.
In the anti-GMO movement, court action has been used by anti-GMO activists as well as by Monsanto. Court action has a complex relationship with other tactics of resistance such as direct action and labeling, and will therefore only be fully considered in this section. Throughout the history of GMO growth and resistance, court action has been used as a way to ensure regulation, as a way to uphold rights relating to patents, and as a punishment for direct action.
Central to the debate regarding GMOs is the idea of regulation. In many places, people have varying opinions about the extent of government intervention or regulation that is necessary in order to appease the often conflicting and diverse interests of the public. Therefore, the extent of corporate regulation varies greatly both within and between nations (Pendras 2011). In the United States, there have been many cases that deal with the deregulation of GMOs, such as Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms and
Center for Food Safety v. Vilsack. Courts can be used as a way to stop potential field test sites, to protest the importation of GMOs, or to push for more information regarding GM approvals (Scoones 2008).
47 The fight over patent rights revolves mainly around the practice of seed saving and the accidental contamination of fields. Seed saving is a practice that has been exercised all over the world since the beginning of agriculture (Mascarenhas and Busch
2006). There is a lot of focus on seed saving in developing nations, but this practice is also widely used in more developed nations such as the United States. The problem that companies such as Monsanto have with seed saving is that it limits their capacity for capital accumulation and hinders their ability to gain a return from the financial investment that was made in the seeds (Mascarenhas and Busch 2006). However, this practice is seen as beneficial and cost-effective by farmers hoping to maintain some independence from seed companies (Mascarenhas and Busch 2006).
In the hopes of making up some of the revenue that is lost to seed saving, transgenic seed companies have pushed in the past for the development of intellectual property rights (IPR) for seed technology. This has been made possible by the increasing receptiveness of regulatory bodies and courts to the idea of patenting nature. In 1970, the
Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) allowed for 17-year protection certificates to be given to new forms of seeds (Mascarenhas and Busch 2006). In 1994, PVPA was altered in order to require farmers to have a license to grow transgenic seeds (Mascarenhas and
Busch 2006). Finally, in 1980, the U.S. Supreme court made the ruling that GM material could be patented. It has been said that the development of intellectual property rights is what allowed seed companies to begin to make a profit (Mascarenhas and Busch 2006).
Of secondary importance in the IPR debate is the debate over the accidental contamination of fields by transgenic material. Contamination of crops by genetically modified seed dispersal can represent a threat to the companies holding the patents, as
48 well as to farmers wanting their crops to maintain a GM-free status. For farmers in
Mexico, the setting for maize domestication, contamination by GM material is seen as potentially harmful to the biodiversity and culture of the region (Kinchy 2010). In a study done by Greenpeace, it was found that contamination of maize in Spain is occurring at multiple levels of the food chain through the contamination of seeds, the contamination of feed, and contamination due to lack of harvest segregation (Cipriano, Carrasco, and
Arbós 2006). In addition, there have been multiple occurrences of canola contamination in Canada, during which traits that were unapproved for consumption ended up in the market (Cipriano, Carrasco, and Arbós 2006).
While there is much debate over how much contamination is occurring, any level of contamination has the potential to greatly impact the food system in the long term.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, one main implication of contamination is that transgenic traits would be passed on for generations, and could therefore end up in unintended plants in a way that society does not know how to control. Of further importance is the impact that contamination could have on the global seed supply. In the chance that farmers would need to stop growing GM crops in the future, there would be a need for a stock of conventional seeds. This stock could be compromised by contamination (Cipriano, Carrasco, and Arbós 2006).
Of greater significance to much of the activist community is the impact that unintentional contamination can have on the organic food market and other conventional farms. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the use of genetically modified seeds, feed, or ingredients causes a food item to be excluded from sale as a certified organic product (McEvoy 2013). Though there is no specific tolerance level set
49 for GM contamination by the USDA, contamination of a farmer’s crops by GMOs could lead to enforcement, fines, or loss of organic certification (McEvoy 2013). Whereas the threat to organic farmers comes primarily through the loss of organic status, the threat of contamination to many conventional farmers lies in the financial penalties that they could face for growing GMOs without a license.
Finally, there has been an extensive amount of litigation against farmers by
Monsanto, particularly in the United States. In many of these cases, acts of seed saving or accidental contamination lead farmers to be in violation of Monsanto’s technology agreement. This contamination can come from the seed or pollen of a neighboring farmer planting GMOs or from the unplanned sprouting or “volunteering” of a GM crop that was grown the previous year (Center for Food Safety 2015). Regardless of the intent of the farmer, he or she may be taken to court by Monsanto for violation of the technology agreement, and may have to pay heavy fines for patent infringement (Center for Food
Safety 2015).
In the case of contamination, much of the court action is not specifically related to protest activity. However, the case of Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association et al. v. Monsanto represents an example of a situation where court action was used to preempt financial repercussions of unintended contamination. In this case, the petitioners were
“seeking a declaration that being contaminated by Respondents’ GE seed does not render them liable for patent infringement” (i). Because the petitioners represent organic farmers with no intent of using GM seeds in their fields, they brought the case to court as a way to guarantee that they would not have to face penalty for any incidental contamination that might occur in the future. After the case was brought to the Court of Appeals, Monsanto
50 stated that they would not sue these farmers for any contamination that might occur, up to one percent (Organic Seed Growers). Upon consideration in the Supreme Court, it was found that the case was not justiciable because Monsanto claimed that it would not sue for minimal contamination, and therefore did not represent a real threat to the farmers.
However, due to the principle of judicial estoppel, this ruling is seen as a victory for the movement because it provides a legal protection from litigation for the farmers in the future (Charles 2013).
Court action is often used as a complement to direct action in the anti-GMO campaign. The extent to which activists make use of court action will depend upon what level of accountability they want to have for their actions. If a campaign pushes for a more open, public form of direct action, it is more likely that they will end up in the court system and will serve some form of punishment (Doherty and Hayes 2012b). The benefit of this method is that it often draws media attention to the protest. As stated by Scoones
(2008), “raising issues in the courts can be a critical route to heightening political—and media—awareness of an issue, and galvanizing politicians (328). As discussed previously, an important aspect of legal mobilization is the ability to obtain judiciary receptivity. This approach is a way to change the public perception regarding GMOs; however, it also runs the risk of drawing negative attention to the methods employed by certain protest groups. This legal tactic has been highly popular in places such as France,
India, and Brazil, and will be discussed in greater detail in the chapter regarding direct action.
51 Framing and Defining Success
Activists using a court action tactic could represent a number of different frames and goals. The frames, goals, and elements of success will be determined for the three main legal examples provided above (court action relating to regulation, court action relating to patents, and court action relating to direct action) (See Table 2).
Table 2: Definition of Frames, Goals, and Success for Court Cases Regulation Frames Anti-GMOs; Pro-regulation Goals Keep all GMOs out; Minimize amount of field trials; Maximize regulation and oversight Success Decrease in funding for GMO projects; Minimization of field trials; Increased regulation; Banning of GMO growth; Banning of GMO imports; Increased safety studies; Winning court cases; Increased public awareness, Financial burden to GMO companies Patent Frames Anti-Monsanto; Protection of farmers/ organic growers; Protection of food and seed stocks; Anti-Globalization; Seed saving rights Goals Minimize Monsanto’s power; Establish precedent protecting farmers from patent cases; Increase regulation; Remove patent rights for GMOs; Reestablish rights to save seeds Success Minimization of patent rights/ changing of standards regarding patenting seeds; Legal protection of farmers; Increased regulation; Winning court case; Farmers do not have to pay Monsanto; Independent use of seeds Direct Action Frames Anti-Monsanto; Anti-GMO Goals Keep all GMOs out; Stop field trials; Gain media attention Success Injunction or ban of GMOs; Ban of field trials; Increased media attention; Increased public awareness; Increased membership in group; Winning court case
In court cases relating to the regulation of GMOs, the two main frames employed are Anti-GMOs and pro-regulation. With these cases, the goals are often to limit the exposure to GMOs as much as possible. This can involve a NIMBY (Not in My
52 Backyard) or NIABY (Not in Any Backyard) geographical extent, but have the focus of elimination of GMOs in the food system, as they are anti-GMO in nature. If the case takes an anti-GMO approach, then successes would involve the more direct results of minimization of field trials, banning of GMOs, or banning of imports, as well as the more indirect results of decreases in funding for GMOs, increased public awareness, and financial burden imposed on Monsanto. If the case takes a pro-regulation approach instead, the goals may not be to outright ban GMOs, but rather to increase the regulation surrounding them. In this case, successes could take the form of increases in regulation or regulatory bodies dealing with GMOs, increases in safety standards, or longer waiting periods for approval.
In court cases relating to patents, there are three main frames that are employed: an anti-Monsanto or anti-globalization frame, a protection of farmers’ rights frame, or a protection of genetic diversity frame. As this type of court case has less of a focus on the elimination of GMOs altogether, many of the goals are more focused on minimizing
Monsanto’s power to control the seed supply and maximizing farmers’ rights to save seeds and to farm without the fear of prosecution. Successes for this frame would likely involve the changing of intellectual property rights for Monsanto or the establishment of some sort of principle protecting farmers from financial ramifications of unintentional contamination.
In court cases relating to direct action, frames are generally going to be anti-
Monsanto or anti-GMO as a whole. As these cases follow instances of crop trashing or other destructive tactics, many of the goals of direct action carry over, with a focus on keeping all GMOs out and stopping field trials. This type of court action also shares the
53 goal with direct action of obtaining media attention. Because of this focus, even if activists are unable to ban GMOs through the court, they may see the increased media attention and public awareness and a success. This tactic is potentially a way to increase membership in the coalition, and therefore may be used successfully as a way to keep the focus on GMOs, rather than a way to ban them.
Direct Action
The first protest tactic that will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 6 is what will be referred to as destruction or direct action. The actions included in this method could also be referred to as civil disobedience, crop trashing, ecotage, or non-violent resistance. These actions can be high reward, due to the attention that they garner from the public, but can also be high risk, as they could lead to a negative portrayal by the media and to the frustration of allies of the public.
Civil disobedience refers to the conscientious refusal to follow specific laws, oftentimes with the hope of changing the opinion of the public regarding the law in place
(Hayes 2007). Civil refers to the human element of the tactic, and can be seen as an extension of the idea of collective action. The use of the term “disobedience” implies that there is some authority or law that the public is refusing to obey (Schroeder 2007). Acts of civil disobedience are collective, public, and illegal, with the element of non-violence as a central tenant (Hayes 2007).
It is important when making use of civil disobedience that protesters maintain a sense of legitimacy in the eyes of the public (Hayes 2007). Because civil disobedience uses techniques that are often unlawful, such as the destruction of property, it is important that the public and the authorities are able to follow the logic between the law breaking
54 and the intended consequence (Hayes 2007). This is why tactics of non-violence are so heavily promoted. It is also important to maintain public legitimacy because the goal of civil disobedience is to convince the public of the importance of the cause being advocated (Hayes 2007). In addition to the public, protesters hope to attract the attention of the officials in charge. In order to effectively communicate a violation of an essential justice, protesters must make sure that the logic of the movement is understandable by those able to affect change (Moraro 2007). In an attempt to obtain public legitimacy, activists might also splinter into two groups, one of which is more extreme in its tactics.
By doing so, the more mainstream group can have a counterpoint to use by which to demonstrate the relative rationality of their position.
Direct action, a concept that overlaps with civil disobedience, is non-violent, confrontational, and often illegal, with a set of implicit rules regarding what is and is not acceptable behavior (Chesters and Welsh 2011). With direct action and civil disobedience alike, there is a notion of accepting punishment for any property damage that occurs
(Hayes 2007). However, the extent to which an activist will accept punishment will vary from group to group. Some state that consenting to punishment for one’s actions is even more important than making a vow of complete non-violence (Moraro 2007). Martin
Luther King advocated accepting punishment for civil disobedience by stating that one who “willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law”
(Moraro 2007:11-12). However, others argue that punishment serves a more practical reason, and is an efficient way to draw attention to the issue being protested (Moraro
55 2007). It is through this arena that the tactics of civil disobedience and court action intersect.
Similar to court action, the use of civil disobedience or direct action will depend upon the extent to which activists feel that they can work within the system to cause change. Direct action has been referred to as “the last resort of social movements,” to be used only when other methods have been found to be impractical (Chesters and Welsh
2011:61-62). It can be particularly beneficial in situations in which activists are unable to work within the social institutions in place, and are forced to rely on tactics lying outside those deemed appropriate by the authorities in power (Shroeder 2007). In a situation where activists are unable to voice their opinions to politicians and may not lobby for the creation of laws regarding their issues, direct action might be implemented (Valocchi
2010). However, direct action can be limited by a society’s rules regarding collective action and assembly. It can also be limited by a society’s views regarding property damage, as was the case after 9/11, when some property damage in the United States began to be classified as terrorism (Chesters and Welsh 2011).
There have been many examples of civil disobedience or direct action throughout history. Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha, or truth force, movement focused on nonviolent protest with a full acceptance of punishment as a way to resist British imperialism
(Satyagraha 2014). Martin Luther King Jr. was said to be influenced by Gandhi’s work in his creation of a “soul force” that used civil disobedience to fight for civil rights in the
United States. King argued that to engage in civil disobedience, a group must establish that an injustice is occurring, negotiate, self-purify, and then eventually turn to direct action. The point of direct action, he argued, is to “create such a crisis and establish such
56 creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue” (King 1963). Both King’s and Gandhi’s experiences with civil disobedience are seen as instrumental in the creation of current direct action techniques.
Other examples of direct action include draft burning during the Vietnam War, anti- nuclear protests, and anti-abortion protests.
When it comes to environmental issues, direct action is often referred to as ecotage. Ecotage, similar to other types of civil disobedience, uses non-violent property damage in an attempt to change a policy regarding environmental issues (Plows, Wall, and Doherty 2004). Ecotage can vary from other types of disobedience in the temporary nature of its groups as well as the extent to which practitioners are willing to accept punishment (as many activists attempt to avoid arrest) (Plows, Wall, and Doherty 2004).
In the anti-GMO movement, direct action techniques have been fairly popular.
These actions have consisted mostly of crop-trashing or crop-destruction, and have been thought to be used as a way to draw attention to the issue of GMOs and to impose financial burdens on the proponents of GMOs (Hayes 2007). While this tactic will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6, the overall frames, goals, and success values will be briefly discussed here (Table 3).
Table 3: Definition of Frames, Goals, and Success for Direct Action Direct Action Frames Anti-GMOs; Anti-Globalization; Anti-Monsanto Goals Keep all GMOs out; Stop field trials; Minimize Monsanto’s power; Gain media attention; Delay crop approval; Build coalition Success Decrease in funding for GMO projects; Minimization of field trials; Banning of GMOs; Increased media attention; Financial burden to GMO companies; Increased public awareness; Increased membership in group; Arrest of protesters
57 The general frames for the direct action sector of protest can include an anti-GMO frame, in which the position is against GMOs in any form; an anti-Monsanto frame; or an anti-globalization frame. In general, protesters who turn to direct action take issue with
GMOs as a whole, and therefore would not find a frame pushing for a mere modification of the market to be sufficient. Some argue that there are primary frames, such as the need for autonomy in the agricultural market, as well as secondary frames, such as a concern for environmental and public health (Hayes 2007).
Because direct action is often thought to be one of the more extreme forms of anti-GMO protest, the goals this tactic are often more absolute as well. Direct action within the anti-GMO movement can have the goal of inspiring a complete ban of GMOs, imposing financial burdens on producers and developers of GMOs, or of gaining the attention of the media and the public. It can be seen as a direct way to stop GMOs, or as an intermediary step that increases the coalition in support of the anti-GMO movement. If direct action is truly the last resort of an activist group, then the goal of this tactic could be to force a response from officials regarding GMOs.
As with the goals of this tactic, success can be divided into three groups. The beginning stage of success deals with the development of the coalition supporting the cause. If the message is being effectively communicated to the media and the public, if there is an increase in membership in the activist group, or if the protest event has encouraged more similar protests, then this could be considered a success. The second stage deals with burdens being imposed on supporters of the technology. If the time and cost of growing GMOs becomes too great due to the efforts of the activists, this could be considered a success. This would lead to the final stage of success, which is a total ban of
58 GMOs or GMO field trials. This is usually the ultimate goal of direct action in the anti-
GMO movement.
Bans/ Moratoria
The use of bans or moratoria in social movements is complicated, as it represents both a method and a potential result. What this means is that while an activist group may push for a ban as a way to protest something, such as many anti-GMO groups have pushed for a ban of GMOs as a way to show their opposition to them, a ban might also be seen as the ultimate goal of the protest. Bans can also be used for a wide variety of topics, so a literary review of the effectiveness of bans on the whole can be hard to find. Because anti-GMO bans will be covered in a subsequent chapter, they will only be covered briefly in this section.
In the anti-GMO movement, bans or moratoria have been fairly popular. The first technical moratorium on genetic engineering occurred in the initial development phase, when scientists created a self-imposed moratorium until they could be more informed of the potential impacts of the technology (Doris 1998). Since then, bans on GMOs have been proposed or implemented in every continent in some way. Of particular note is the moratorium on GMOs that took place in the European Union from 1998 to 2004 (Seifert
2009). Europe is also thought to have had 174 regions and around 4500 municipalities that have at one time been considered GMO-free (Meyer 2007). Due to the significance of GMO bans in Mexico, this country will be the primary focus of Chapter 5. However, many other countries within Latin America have made use of banning techniques too, and will therefore be discussed briefly as well.
59 Table 4: Definition of Frames, Goals, and Success for Bans Bans/ Moratoria Frames Anti-GMOs; Anti-Globalization; Anti-Monsanto; Need for increased safety Goals Keep all GMOs out; Stop field trials; Minimize Monsanto’s power; Delay approval so modifications can be made Success Decrease in funding for GMO projects; Minimization of field trials; Banning of GMOs; Increased public awareness; Increased membership in group; Delay of approval
Because bans will be covered in Chapter 5, the frames, goals, and successes that will be discussed now (see Table 4) can be very generally applied to the pro-moratorium sector of anti-GMO protest. Similar to the tactic of direct action, banning is one of the more extreme tactics of protest. In most cases, protesters will be opposed to GMOs as a whole, and will therefore take an anti-GMO or anti-Monsanto frame when describing the issue. Although, some activists proposing a ban may not be wholly against GMOs, and may therefore use a frame suggesting increased safety. Frames could be representative of the specific negatives as well, and would thus include frames relating to the environment, to social issues, or to economic impacts.
Often the goal of a ban is to stop the production, testing, or use of GMOs, in effect creating a moratorium. Because of this, the goals of this tactic will generally be to completely halt all research and production of GMOs, all field trials of GMOs, all growth of GMOs, and all consumption of GMOs. The extent of the ban can vary depending on whether the goal is more localized or more focused on stopping GMOs around the globe.
If activists do not take such an extreme stance, they may instead hope to use a ban with the goal of temporarily halting production so that beneficial modifications to the product and its safety can be made.
60 There may be many ways that success can be achieved using a ban, although the overall measure of success is whether or not a temporary or permanent ban was achieved.
Depending on the goals of the activists, a temporary ban may be seen as a full success.
With many activist groups though, a ban is only found to be successful if it completely stops the use of GMOs. In the chapter on bans, attention will be paid to why certain sites were unable to maintain a ban, and what that means for the success of banning as a tactic in the anti-GMO movement. Lesser successes may be achieved, such as increasing public awareness or building group membership, but these are often not considered to represent a full success of the tactic.
Levels of Resistance
In the three case studies that are discussed in the following chapters, protest is framed in terms of levels of resistance. These levels are not concrete, but represent a general understanding of the progression of intensity from one tactic to the next. The three levels of resistance can be seen in Figure 5.
61 Figure 5: Levels of Resistance in the Anti-GMO Movement
In this figure, resistance is considered in terms of the three protest tactics that will be discussed in chapters 4-6: labeling, (temporary) banning, and direct action. These methods have the general goals of informing, reforming, or rejecting GMOs, and have more specific goals of working with GMOs (labeling), temporarily removing GMOs
(banning), or permanently removing GMOs (direct action). Areas of overlap within the figure demonstrate that countries may often use more than one tactic of resistance. The quotes provided at the bottom of each circle represent the area that the tactic aims to impact. Not in my body refers to a personal decision to reject GMOs. Not in My
Backyard refers to an attempt to impact distribution within a local area. Not in Any
Backyard refers to a goal of stopping GMO production in a much greater, possibly international area.
62 Chapter 3: Small-Scale Agriculture and Food Sovereignty Framing
In researching various anti-GMO movements across the globe, it became apparent that being able to frame the GMO issue in terms that are understandable by the general public is an important part of the development of a successful movement. This framing leads to the cohesion of the movement, and can draw upon aspects of the technology that are most significant to specific locations. Movement framing may be the result of the creation of a deliberate narrative, but may also result unintentionally, and may be made clear through a group’s actions instead of their words. In this chapter I will explore one of the most successful frames that has come out of the anti-GMO movement. This frame has been implemented in multiple contexts, and has been attached to both the banning and direct action techniques, which will be discussed in greater depth in chapters 5 and 6.
As will be explored throughout much of this thesis, activist groups have employed a number of different frames in their anti-GMO movements. According to my schema of success, looking at the framing of a movement will help to determine its subsequent goals and levels of achieved success. Some frames have worked better than others, but one frame that has worked very well throughout numerous local anti-GMO movements has been the pro-small scale farming or pro-food sovereignty frame. Within this movement, peasants, indigenous people, and other small-scale farmers have acted as a representation of many of the values that are associated with food sovereignty.
The countries that will be discussed in relation to this small-scale agricultural frame are France, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Costa Rica, Haiti, and India. These countries have implemented a variety of resistance tactics, in which framing has been a significant part of their opposition. France and Mexico will be covered in their own chapters, so they
63 will only be discussed briefly in terms of this agricultural narrative. The remaining countries will be covered in more detail, as they have not been chosen for a chapter case study. A general description of how this framing was used in each country is provided in
Table 5.
Table 5: Use of Framing in Each Country Country Tactic Activists Framing Details France Direct Action (crop Peasant Farmers Paysanne agriculture as destruction) (paysanne) French food culture; Cultural food sovereignty Mexico Moratorium Peasant Farmers Protecting landrace (campesino) varieties; Food sovereignty (all types) Colombia Moratorium Indigenous Protecting landrace farmers (Zenú) varieties; Cultural food sovereignty Peru Moratorium Peasant Farmers Protecting landrace (Papa Arariwas) varieties; Cultural food sovereignty Costa Rica Moratorium Peasants, Protecting biodiversity; Indigenous Economic/ Environmental food sovereignty Haiti Direct Action (seed Peasant Farmers Protecting local farming burning) practices; Economic/ cultural food sovereignty India Direct Action (crop Peasant Farmers Protecting local farmers; destruction); Seed Saving/ Economic food Stealth seeds sovereignty
Cases Employing this Framework
Two groups have been responsible for the majority of GM crop destruction in
France: the Confédération Paysanne (CP) and the Faucheurs Volontaires (FV). The CP is
64 an agricultural union in France that was founded in 1987 in order to promote an alternative model of agriculture that values sustainable methods, biodiversity, small-scale farms, and farmers’ rights (Seifert 2013). Drawing on their slogan “to produce, to employ, to preserve,” this group’s approach has been comprised of six main themes: working with nature, ensuring fair distribution of wages, improving the quality of the product, increasing farm autonomy, allowing for transferability to new generations, and encouraging local development (Qui Sommes-nous 2012). At a time when France was pushing for a more industrialized agricultural design, the CP emerged as a champion of peasant agriculture and as another union option for those wanting to distance themselves from the leading agricultural union in France, Fédération Nationale des Syndicats d’Exploitants d’Agricoles (FNSEA). Beginning in 1997, GMOs became one of the leading issues confronted by the CP (Heller 2007).
The CP has been very effective at reconstructing the image of the paysan in the minds of French society. Formerly a term with a connotation similar to “thug,” paysan was reappropriated by members of the CP in order to denote a small farmer and protector of traditional French lifestyle (Heller 2005). The development of this narrative was also essential for the establishment of paysans as experts on French agriculture and culture. In a realm that was typically comprised solely of scientific experts, paysans provided an alternative means to judge GMOs in which socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental risks were evaluated alongside scientific assessments (Heller 2007).
CP leader José Bové, whose role in the movement will be described more fully in chapter 6, was the leader of this framing development. Although Bové was not born into a peasant farming family, his experience with small-scale, specialized farming allowed
65 him to act as the spokesperson for peasant farmers. Through this role, he established the importance of peasant farmers to French culture. In this example, peasant farmers are seen as a cultural good in need of protection from the modernization and Americanization of farming in France. However, these farmers were also often the main activists taking part in direct action techniques. While members of the CP were engaging in crop destruction, they were also actively selling the public on why it was necessary for them to do so, and how crop destruction was ultimately protecting peasant agriculture.
Much like the French anti-GMO movement, the Mexican movement has focused largely on the importance of the peasant (and indigenous) class. The Mexican movement has used this group as a counter-authority to hegemonic knowledge to some extent, but the peasant class has primarily been seen as the protectors of indigenous knowledge and biodiversity. The difference in portrayal has a lot to do with the role of traditional farmers in Mexico, where this group makes up a much larger portion of society than the
Confédération Paysanne in France (Wainwright and Mercer 2009).
This translation of the frame to fit Mexican activists’ agenda makes sense when one considers the importance of the contamination risk frame in Mexico. Contrary to
France, where risk has been explained primarily in terms of the socioeconomic impacts of
GMOs, in Mexico, the issue has been described more as the potential risk that GMOs pose to traditional crops. In this scenario, it is seen as the duty of the local farmers to protect the biodiversity that exists in traditional Mexican agriculture.
Similar to Mexico, Colombia is considered to be a center of biodiversity. Much of this diversity comes in the form of criollo varieties of maize, with Colombian farmers producing around twenty-five different types (Fitting 2013). Because of this tradition of
66 cultivation, maize is considered to be a significant part of Colombian culture as well, especially to the Zenú indigenous farmers, to whom maize represents their collective history, as well as their food sovereignty (Fitting 2013). Though Colombia has been growing GM crops since 2002, its production levels have remained fairly low in comparison to other Latin American countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and
Bolivia (James 2012).
Following the tradition of Mexican activists, Colombian protestors started the
Seeds of Identity campaign and called for a moratorium on the commercialization of GM maize (Fitting 2013). One activist framed the issue by stating, “because of the loss of our seed, the introduction of technical packages [of improved seed], and the lack of respect for our traditions and regulations (normas) we decided to shut the door to this seed”
(Fitting 2013:15). Colombia’s use of moratoria has consisted mainly of the creation of
Transgenic Free Territories (TFTs). The Zenú have been instrumental in the development of TFTs in resguardos, or reserves, throughout Colombia (Fitting 2013).
Activists have been able to frame this issue as a threat to biodiversity, culture, and food sovereignty, and were able to create territories that are free of GMOs. Also, upon the development of test fields, the government and companies involved upheld the wishes of the activists and prevented growth of GM maize within 300 meters of any resguardo
(Fitting 2013). This demonstrates the effectiveness of the framing of Zenú indigenous people as protectors of local biodiversity.
Peru is another country that has made use of the framing as a way to establish peasant or indigenous groups as authorities on GMOs. Because of the importance of potatoes to Peruvian life, the country has a park dedicated to the cultivation of diverse
67 forms of potatoes, with farmers known as Papa Arariwas, or Guardians of the Potato, in charge of their development (Stephenson 2012). Initially, Peru’s government was in support of GMO introduction, as evidenced by the signing of Supreme Decree 003-2011 by President Alan García, which would have allowed GMOs into the country (Gardner
2011). However, after the decree was put forward, widespread opposition led to the development of a 10-year moratorium on GMOs (Ten Year Ban 2012). Antonietta
Gutierrez, from Peru’s National Agrarian University, stressed the importance that people see the movement not as being against GMOs but instead in favor of the rich biodiversity and peasant livelihoods that exist in Peru (Murphie 2013). In other words, the movement in Peru has been framed as a way to ensure that peasant agriculture is not replaced by outside agriculture that is inappropriate for the conditions that exist in Peru.
Much like the other Latin American countries being discussed, the anti-GMO movement in Costa Rica was partially triggered by Mexico’s experience with contamination and their resulting anti-GMO movement (Pearson 2012). Risk of contamination from outside forces led to the development of the Costa Rican narrative of peasant or indigenous protection of local biodiversity. Groups such as the Biodiversity
Coordination Network of Costa Rica and the Alliance for the Protection of Biodiversity were active in the anti-GMO movement, working to promote indigenous and peasant rights, local biodiversity, and a platform of opinion regarding GMOs that differed from the dominant international position (Pearson 2012). Much like the French movement,
Costa Rica’s movement had a charismatic leader named Fabián Pacheco, who worked as an intermediary to manage fundraising and frame brokerage for the movement (Pearson
2012).
68 Costa Rica’s history has been very influential in the development of the movement’s narrative. In Transgenic-Free Territories in Costa Rica: Networks, place, and the politics of life, Thomas Pearson describes how one activist used the story of the
Costa Rican defeat of William Walker, who was at the time attempting to conquer much of Central America, as a way to call upon Costa Rican ideas of nationalism and anti- globalization (2012:96). This idea of outsider risk was furthered by Costa Rica’s experience in the 1980s with an International Monetary Fund induced restructuring of the agricultural sector that favored large-scale farms over small, indigenous or peasant plots
(Pearson 2012). In addition, Costa Rica’s experience with the issue of bioprospecting, or the more critical term, biopiracy, has led citizens to be wary of outside countries wanting to use the country for its resources (Miller 2006). All of these experiences have led to the development of an anti-colonialization or anti-globalization risk frame that calls for Costa
Rican natives to actively engage in the protection of their country’s resources. This frame differs a little from other peasant activist frames because it has less of a focus on peasant/ indigenous groups as developers of traditional agricultural methods and more of a focus on these groups as guardians of the nature that exists in Costa Rica for purposes other than food production.
Approximately 25 percent of Costa Rica’s land, or around 1,206,000 hectares, have been declared Wild Protected Areas (Engels et al. 2006). In addition to its internal and agricultural uses for biodiversity, Costa Rica has marketed itself as a center for ecotourism. By doing so, it has given economic value to the environmental quality of the country. It has also led to the consideration of Costa Rica as a protector of genetic resources, a right that was given by the 1998 Biodiversity Law (Pearson 2012). The risk
69 of genetic contamination frame is strengthened by this call to protect Costa Rica’s biodiversity from takeover by transgenic plants. This relationship is demonstrated by the phrase “our seeds, our food, and our health—our sovereignty” (Pearson 2012:91). Costa
Rican protest groups have been active in their assertion of their role of native people in the determining what is best for Costa Rica, a role which has led to the creation of between 51 and 62 transgenic-free cantóns (administrative subunit of a province) in the nation (Lopez 2013).
Haiti is an example of a location where crop destruction was not a continuous part of anti-GMO efforts, but was taken up as a result of a specific event. This event occurred in 2010, when Monsanto attempted to donate hybrid seeds to Haiti after an earthquake caused widespread agricultural destruction (Mazzeo and Brenton 2013). Activist leader
Chavannes Jean-Baptiste said that the decision was “a very strong attack on agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds…and on what is left of our environment in
Haiti” (Mazzeo and Brenton 2013:126). In response to Monsanto’s donation, Haitian activists pledged to burn any seeds provided by Monsanto (Bell 2010).
Haiti has had a history of rejecting top-down foreign agricultural techniques that goes back as far as the introduction of the plow (Mazzeo and Brenton 2013). This has been for two reasons: first, that foreign aid does not do anything to increase the sustainability of agricultural processes in Haiti, and second, that it does not rely on indigenous or local methods, which are prized by Haitian farmers (Mazzeo and Brenton
2013). Haitian farmers have generally been more favorable toward agricultural techniques that have been promoted by local farmers, and though Haiti has had issues with food security, its citizens have still focused on a solution coming from their own
70 peasantry. Monsanto’s technology, which is external, requires annual payments for seeds, and could require other costly inputs, represents the exact type of agricultural innovation that Haitian farmers are trying to fight against.
Haiti’s feelings toward food sovereignty are also related to its previous history of
French slavery. During and directly after this time, the importance of being able to produce one’s own food became very important for Haitian peasants (Mazzeo and
Brenton 2013). The ability to sell crops that are not used for immediate consumption represents a significant form of economic independence for farmers. There is some culture of seed saving that goes with this tradition, but many farmers actually choose to purchase their seeds from a local market rather than save them for the next planting.
Similar to many of the other movements discussed, anti-GMO activists in Haiti have worked to place their movement within a larger, global pro-peasantry movement by teaming up with groups such as Vía Campesina (Mazzeo and Brenton 2013). Jean-
Baptiste has acted as a leader of the two main anti-GMO groups in Haiti—Mouvman
Peyizan Papay and Mouvement National des Paysans de Congrès Papaye—and often has taken on the role of spokesperson for Haitian farmers, much like Bové in France (It is
Our Way 2010). Even in the face of potential food shortage, farmers in Haiti have shown little interest in GM seeds due to their preference for local varieties that have been cultivated with respect to local conditions. Their GM stance can best be summarized by their motto of “peasant (or local) seeds = food sovereignty” (Mazzeo and Brenton
2013:122). Haitians have pushed forward one of the most intense pro-peasantry frames in the anti-GMO movement, which these frames being backed by a history of support for traditional agricultural methods.
71 The final case of pro-peasantry framing that will be considered is the case of direct action resistance and stealth seed creation in India. There have been many groups active in the protest of GMOs, but the main group of interest in the direct action realm in
India has been the Karnataka Rajya Ryota Sangha (KRRS), which is the Karnataka State
Farmers Association. Through the KRRS and other groups, several direct action campaigns were started in India, including Operation Cremate Monsanto and Monsanto,
Quit India! (Scoones 2008). The anti-GMO effort became significant to the KRRS because of agricultural issues such as farm subsidies, price control, and seed saving and patents (Scoones 2008).
Efforts to industrialize agriculture in India countries have led to fears of a disappearance of the traditional peasantry, as well as the cultural significance that it provides. Whereas in France, peasant farmers have begun to represent a very small portion of society, in India, much of the population still works off of the land. Farmers in
India have thus been represented both as a cultural commodity in need of protection
(victim) and as protectors of traditional agriculture (hero) (Scoones 2008). Both the
French and Indian movements criticized the hegemonic style of agriculture with its promotion of GMOs, and provided an alternative view of “good” food and “good” stewardship of the land.
One issue that is primary for the Indian movement is the issue of seed saving.
Seed saving has been a large part of Indian agricultural custom, and the potential halt to seed saving that GMOs would induce is a large area of contention for farmers. This is why the concept of terminator technology had such importance in the Indian debate. The
72 importance of seed saving to Indian culture could also have contributed to the surge of stealth seeds, or unauthorized seeds, in India.
Small-Scale Agriculture and Food Sovereignty
In looking at all of these cases, it becomes clear that the use of small-scale agricultural framing has been a way for activists to draw on an underlying concern about food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is an issue that often comes up when proposing large- scale agricultural changes in a country, and is particularly relevant to the anti-GMO movement. This term draws somewhat on the idea of food security, but is thought to be a more political than technical concept (Lee 2007).
La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement, is considered to be one of the originators of the concept of food sovereignty. Their first definition of the term described it as “the right of each nation to maintain and develop its own capacity to produce its basic foods respecting cultural and productive diversity” (Food Sovereignty
1996). Food sovereignty has been proposed as a human right that applies to a group of people, rather than an individual (Claeys 2013). The International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) has described food sovereignty as being comprised of four
“pillars,” which cannot be separated: the right to food, the right to access productive resources, the mainstreaming of agroecological production, and the promotion of equitable trade and local markets (Lee 2007:6).
In addition to its multitude of definitions, food sovereignty can be understood in social (cultural), economic, or environmental terms (see Figure 6). The nexus of these three spheres can be thought of as political food sovereignty. Culturally, food sovereignty can be seen as a way to encourage traditional or peasant forms of agriculture and
73 consumption. Economic food sovereignty aims to reconnect small-scale farmers with agricultural production, and takes issue with the globalization and industrialization of agriculture by large multinational firms. The development of stealth seeds can be seen as a response to economic issues of food sovereignty. Environmental food sovereignty has to do with the implementation of agroecological methods that work with nature rather than trying to change it.
Figure 6: Three Spheres of Food Sovereignty
Within the case studies that will be developed in the following chapters, all three of these spheres of food sovereignty have been implemented. In the French movement, sovereignty has been discussed mainly in cultural and economic terms, with activists focusing on the impact that GMOs could have on French food culture, and the role that globalization plays in this transformation. Within many of the Latin American cases, food sovereignty is discussed in economic, cultural, and environmental terms. GMOs present potential consequences to the economic future of Latin American countries through the impacts to trade relations, to the environmental health of each country through the
74 potential contamination of landrace varieties and other biodiversity, and cultural consequences through the transformation of traditional food production practices.
There have been many reasons why food sovereignty has developed as a dominant frame in the anti-GMO movement. Food sovereignty has developed as an opposing viewpoint to the traditional conception of a market economy (Claeys 2013).
Specifically, food sovereignty-based movements have been influenced by negative experiences with structural adjustment programs and other agricultural changes that have come with the expansion of multinational agricultural firms and production methods. La
Via Campesina (2002) states that:
This economic system treats both people and nature as a means to an end with the
sole aim of generating profits [and] undermines all forms of small-scale family
farm and peasant agriculture which are based on the sustainable use of local
resources for the production of quality food for local consumption.
By pushing for agricultural methods more in line with the three spheres of food sovereignty, activists hope to reconnect citizens with the decisions that underpin local food production.
Within the overarching food sovereignty frame, peasants, indigenous, and small- scale farmers have stood out as the primary archetypes of best agricultural practices.
These activist groups are often conceived of as engaging in a classic David versus
Goliath battle, in which local heroes fight against imposing corporations such as
Monsanto. In a lot of cases, this battle has taken the form of a protection of genetic resources such as seeds and landrace crops. Peasants, indigenous, and small-scale farmers have been responsible throughout history for the cultivation of local varieties of
75 agriculture, and therefore are seen as primary protectors of these resources. As has been stated by many activist groups, this does necessarily mean that these groups are opposed to changes in production methods, but rather that they often push for agricultural techniques that have been developed by peasant agriculturalists for peasant agriculturalist. Instead of pushing for a concentration of the agricultural chain, activists advocate for a redistribution of the technology to the general public.
The small-scale agricultural or food sovereignty frame has been very widespread and effective throughout the anti-GMO movements across the world. Even though this framing device has been successful in many locations, it has not worked everywhere, and has led to some contradictions and conflicts within the movements. In the case of many countries in Europe where there was no real tie to small-scale agriculturalists, this framing device simply did not convince the public to accept destruction of GMOs. For many other countries, one large conflict has come from the fact that these activist groups have often tried to form international coalitions through organizations such as La Via
Campesina. This can be a useful way to develop a cogent framework or to gain more international support, but can undermine some of the efforts of more localized movements. This conflict has even occurred between peasant and indigenous groups within a country, where these two groups do always have the same end goals for protest.
In implementing the framework described in this chapter, it is important that activists be able to draw a connection between GMOs and the risks that they could provide to the traditional agricultural and cultural way of life in a country.
76 Chapter 4: Labeling: The US Case Study
The study of labeling is a relatively robust field of research. Much of the research centers on nutritional labeling, although topics such as fair trade, carbon footprint labeling, and many others have been increasingly addressed. Labels have been used for a number of environmental and social issues in the past, though they are not always seen as an intentional protest tactic. For instance, many people make the choice to purchase organic milk without seeing themselves as part of the organic movement. By making this choice, they are adopting a Not In My Body (NIMB) point of view, and are not always concerned with the promotion of organics in the overall market (Premanandh 2007).
However, others see labeling as a form of collective action in which consumers “buycott” items that represent the environmental or social attributes that they wish to promote
(Cliath 2007). Labeling is often promoted over banning by economists, who believe that provision of information will allow consumers to make a more impactful choice (Meyer
2007).
The type of labeling that will be described in this section is also known as values- based labeling, and ideally leads to what is known as conscientious consumption
(Morgan and Goh 2004). Values-based labels can include environmental, social, or ethical choices, often including a combination of the three (Coutrelis and Weber 2012).
The use of this type of label has been increasing as the popularity of green products has increased across the globe (Herrick 2005). Values-based labels are generally divided into green labels, which are environmentally conscious, and blue labels, which are socially conscious. Green labels, therefore, represent information regarding the environmental cost of production, transportation, and use of a product (Pilar 2000). While studies have
77 shown varying levels of success with green labeling, two labels- Energy Star and the recycling label- have experienced the greatest amount of success (Herrick 2005).
One element of labeling practices that has the ability to impact their success is the question of how much information to include in the label. Though green labels have grown in success in the past few decades, communication of the green image has been found to be an area of weakness (Herrick 2005). Producers of green labels must find the correct balance so that they are able to provide enough information that the consumer can understand the label, but not so much that the consumer becomes confused or overwhelmed. In the case of labels, more information is not always better, as consumers run the risk of reaching an “info limit,” in which they are satisfied with the amount of information they have, but unable to make an effective decision (Helme 2013). In the case of nutritional labeling, customers may make use of the label, but may not be fully aware of the meaning and impact of all of the terms (H.R. 1699 2013). Confusion over how much information to include, as well as how to ensure credibility demonstrate the need for label standards (Schurman and Munro 2009).
When looking at the effectiveness of product labels, some research has considered the impact that positive and negative labels have on consumption behavior. In general, companies with green products will engage in behaviors that promote the green aspects of their products, while companies that do not use green techniques will simply leave out any information relating to production techniques (Helme 2013). Some studies have shown that when comparing a product with a positive label to a product with a neutral label, consumers will show very minimal preference for the positive label (Gillam 2014).
In the anti-GMO movement, this would be similar to comparing a product with a GMO-
78 free label (positive) with a product with no GMO information (neutral). In contrast, a label displaying negative attributes is found to have the greatest impact. This is because consumers are frequently driven to avoid negative consequences of their consumption decisions (James 2012). When applied to nutrition labels, an example of this would be consumers’ use of calorie information to avoid high calorie foods. In the anti-GMO movement, this would suggest that mandatory GMO labels would be more effective than labels stating that something is GMO-free.
The use of labeling has been promoted not only for the benefits that additional information can have on consumer choice, but also for the potential impact that labeling can have on underlying market structures. Ideally, labels help consumers form a connection between the product that they are purchasing and the underlying environmental and social processes that are part of the creation of the product (Adoption of Genetically 2013). By limiting the ability to deny a product’s geographical, social, and environmental origins, as well as the consumer’s role in the continuation of certain practices, label use leads to the “defetishization” of commodities (Adoption of
Genetically 2013). Commodity chain analysis contributes to an environment where consumers are more connected to that which they consume. In theory, support of a green or blue product would signify a customer’s support of a change in the structures and processes underlying the product.
Much of the potential success of the labeling tactic lies in its ability to challenge previous conceptions of “the market” in order to form an economic system that challenges producers to consider non-economic factors (Lappé 2011). The use of labels allows for a consideration of the process behind the creation of a product, thereby “re-
79 linking production, trade, and consumption in a manner that bridges the widening global/local divide” (Barham 2002:351). In a realm where exploitative behaviors are often hidden in the final product and market price represents a very limited scope of the value of a product, labeling offers consumers the chance to recreate the market in a way that represents their values.
While labeling can be a positive way to impact consumer choice, it has also faced a number of challenges in its implementation. First, many people state that they have a lack of trust in green labels (Runge, Bagnara, and Jackson 2001). This has a lot to do with the wide usage of green labels on products that have not been proven to be especially environmentally friendly. This practice, often referred to as “greenwashing,” can be harmful to companies promoting actual environmentally friendly products. The development of standards for each green characteristic would greatly enhance consumers’ trust of green labels. The second issue for labeling is that many people see it as a practice that can only be used by the elite. This perception is due to the price premium that is frequently placed on green or blue products (Falkner 2007). The final issue that labeling faces is the potential for consumers to feel that by buying a labeled product, they have already done their part in the movement. In order to lead to true success, labeling should allow consumers to engage in a full range of practices demonstrating their support
(Falkner 2007).
Frames, goals, and possible successes of the anti-GMO movement are provided in
Table 6. In the anti-GMO movement, the framing used for the labeling tactic can vary depending on the ultimate goal of the activist group. At its most basic level, frames will focus on either a strictly anti-GMO frame or a frame that supports a consumer’s right to
80 knowledge regarding the GMO status of his or her product. The right-to-know frame has been very popular in the anti-GMO movement thus far. Consumers could add in their personal reasoning for being opposed to GMOs (social, environmental, etc.), but the overall frame will focus on the proper place of GMOs in the market.
Table 6: Definition of Frames, Goals, and Success for Labeling Labeling Frames Anti-GMOs; Anti-Monsanto; Need for increased safety; Pro- increased safety measures; Right to information; Pro-regulation Goals Push all GMOs out of market (eventual); Minimize Monsanto’s power; Delay product approval; Increase consumer knowledge; Increase regulation; Develop GMO-free standards; Impose financial costs on GMO producers; Store product boycott Success Decrease in funding for GMO projects; Increased public awareness; Increased membership in group; Delay of product approval; Financial burden to GMO companies; Success of GMO-free products; Development of GMO-free standards; Stores discontinuing GMO selection; Change in societal norm regarding GMOs
Depending upon the severity of the activist stance, goals of this tactic will be either to create a mandatory labeling regime for GMOs or to outlaw GMOs entirely.
Mandatory labeling would have the goal of increasing consumer knowledge regarding
GMOs, and could also have an implicit goal of encouraging consumers to make purchasing decisions that do not include GMOs. If an activist group is completely anti-
GMO, then the ultimate goal would be to make the buying atmosphere so negatively charged against GMOs that companies and stores begin to stop producing or using them.
Success in labeling has been achieved in the past, particularly with nutrition labeling in the United States (H.R. 1699 2013). In comparing nutritional labeling to carbon footprint labeling, Beattie (2012) states that in order to achieve success, a label
81 must elicit an emotional response. In the past, labeling has attained mixed levels of success due to the fact that even if people can understand the differences between product labels, it does not mean that they will take the time to understand them. Some argue that success is achieved if consumers become more aware about the connection between production and consumption practices (Stein and Rodriguez-Cerezo 2009). If the use of labeling causes a change of the norms regarding food or even leads to an open discussion of food values, this tactic could be seen as partially successful (Zacune 2012). Others argue that willingness to pay for non-GMO products is an indicator that the tactic has been successful (Lappé 2011). Ultimate successes would include the creation of mandatory labeling, the development of a market for non-GMO items, or the overall eradication of GMOs.
Labeling in the United States
When beginning this research, the United States immediately stood out as an area of interest. I had seen stories in the news about GMO protests and had come across the occasional grocery item labeled with a GE-free seal, but had not witnessed substantial changes in the national policy regarding GMOs. While the United States was one of the early adopters of biotechnology, the anti-GMO resistance movement in the United States has only gained national attention in the past decade or so. Compared to other anti-GMO movements, the movement in the US has experienced a level of success that has been much slower and less encompassing (Schurman and Munro 2009).
The anti-GMO movement in the US has consisted of multiple tactics, however, most seem to fall into the categories of general protest (marches, rallies, etc.) and consumer based labeling or regulatory efforts. Early in the GMO debate, activists focused
82 on raising awareness of the potential health risks of GMOs, part of which included a push for government regulation. In some cases, this push even predated the release of GM technology (Schurman and Munro 2009). It is important to note that throughout the campaign in the US, activists have made use of counterexpertise. Rather than taking a purely anti-technology stance, many activists pushed for the use of scientific procedures as a way to increase knowledge of the safety of GM products (Schurman and Munro
2009). To argue that the anti-GMO movement in the US is inherently “anti-science,” as many supporters of GMOs have done, would disregard the fact that many anti-GMO activists have pushed for scientific studies and increased testing of GMO content as a way to ensure safety.
Since its inception, the anti-GMO movement has experienced a significant increase in groups dedicated solely to the GMO issue, as well as environmental groups taking on GMOs as one of their research areas. The number of groups focusing on GMOs grew from approximately 14 in the 1980s, to 34 in the 1990s, to the countless groups that exist today (Schurman and Munro 2009). Some notable activist groups within the US include Millions Against Monsanto, Center for Food Safety, Greenpeace, Just Label It!, the Non-GMO Project, the Organic Consumers Association, and numerous statewide
Right to Know and GMO-Free coalitions.
GMO Growth in the United States
The US is an important actor in the global growth of GMOs because it is a huge exporter of agriculture, was one of the first adopters of genetic engineering, is the home of Monsanto, and currently produces the largest amount of GMOs (James 2012). The US presently has 69.5 million hectares of land devoted to the growth of GM crops including
83 maize, cotton, potato, soybean, squash, sugarbeet, canola, papaya, and alfalfa (James
2012). This represents 41 percent of global GMO growth (James 2012). At this time, 90 percent of maize, 93 percent of soybean, and 90 percent of cotton in the US is genetically modified (Adoption of Genetically 2013). Herbicide-tolerant crops are the most popular in the US, with insect-resistant and stacked crops also being used (Adoption of
Genetically 2013). The development of some of these main crops in the US can be seen in Figure 7, with the numbers on the far right representing the percentage of total agriculture that is genetically modified.
Figure 7: Adoption of Genetically Engineered Crops in the United States, 1996-2013
Source: http://ers.usda.gov/data-products/adoption-of-genetically-engineered-crops-in- the-us/recent-trends-in-ge-adoption.aspx#.U2pJN6Xoi0s
84
Regulation
In order to understand US policy regarding GMO labeling, it is important to look at the GMO regulations currently in place. In 1986, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a document entitled “The Coordinated Framework for
Regulation of Biotechnology” (Lieberman and Gray 2008). This document, considered to be the guiding principle on regulation of GMOs in the United States, divided the responsibility of the existing regulatory bodies in order to control the development and release of GMOs (Questions & Answers 2013). In this document, the United States
Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are listed as the three bodies responsible for the regulation of GMOs (Farquhar and Meyer 2007).
The concept from this framework that is most relevant to the US policy regarding
GMOs is the stance concerning the specific risk of GMOs to society. The US is unique when compared to other states due to its policy of “substantial equivalence” in terms of
GMO regulation. In the US, if a GM food product is found to be substantially equivalent to its conventional counterpart, then it does not require additional safety measures
(Lieberman and Gray 2008). While certain characteristics are considered for the determination of substantial equivalence, there is no set definition. However, equivalence means generally that the nutritional value and composition are similar enough to other established products to make them equivalently safe (Farquhar and Meyer 2007).
Because of the opinion of the regulatory bodies with regard to GMOs, food that has been
85 genetically engineered in the United States is regulated using much of the same methods as conventional food.
The other concept that is valued in the US regarding GMO production is the idea of product over process. This means that a genetically modified product will be judged for safety based on the end product rather than the process used to generate the product
(Farquhar and Meyer 2007). This creates a divide between the methods used to create
GMOs, which are seen as distinctive and therefore patentable, and the final GM product, which is seen as equivalent to the conventional (Ling and Lakatos 2013). While this standard allowed for an almost immediate regulatory framework for GMOs, it set the standard in the US that GMOs and conventional products would be considered to be substantially equivalent if the end products have the same nutrition and allergen composition. Due to this standard, labeling of GM products can be seen by regulators as superfluous, as both the GE and the conventional are found to be equivalent (Farquhar and Meyer 2007).
The US Agencies that Regulate GMOs
The regulatory standards that are applied to GMOs have been set by the three primary agencies responsible for their regulation: the FDA, the USDA, and the EPA. The decisions made by these three agencies have had a large impact on how GMOs are viewed by society, and have ultimately affected how activists treat the technology when they form protests. Looking at the institutional treatment of GMOs allows for a better understanding of the regulatory environment in the United States, and why this environment is so different from that which exists in many other countries.
86 FDA- The FDA is primarily responsible for monitoring GMOs as they relate to food and animal feed (Questions and Answers 2013). The broad categories falling within the FDA’s regulatory umbrella include fruits and vegetables, food additives, dietary supplements, animal feed, human drugs, and cosmetics (Fish and Rudenko 2001).
Specific concerns that are addressed by the FDA include the presence of allergens or potentially unsafe food additives in the new crop (Farquhar and Meyer 2007). When developing a genetically engineered (GE) plant or animal, it is advised that a developer go through a voluntary consultation with the FDA in order to minimize later issues associated with the product and to ensure that the product fulfills the requirements of section 402(a)(1) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) (Questions and Answers 2013). Voluntary consultations usually involve a description of what new traits have been added, as well as what impact the genetic engineering could have on the allergenicity, toxicity, or nutritional content of the GE product (Questions and Answers
2013). The FDA has currently completed 95 consultations on GE products including 30 on corn, 15 on cotton, 12 on canola, 12 on soybean, and 24 on a combination of crops including alfalfa, cantaloupe, creeping bentgrass, flax, papaya, plum, potato, radicchio, squash, sugar beet, tomato, and wheat (Questions and Answers 2013).
In its consultations, the FDA, following the regulatory standard set in the US, looks mainly at the characteristics of the food or feed that is being proposed for consumption (Kessler 2013). Whether a food is genetically engineered or not, it will be judged based off of the characteristics of the final product. If however, the addition made to an organism causes it to have a change in composition that is not known to be safe, then it is regulated as a food additive under section 409 of the FD&C Act (Kessler 2013).
87 Once the FDA has determined that there are no unresolved issues relating to the safety of the GE product, the consultation process is finished (Consultation Procedures 1997).
USDA- When it comes to regulation of GMOs, the USDA’s regulatory authority relates to the potential impact that GMOs could have on plant and animal health
(Biotechnology Regulatory Services 2014). The Animal and Plant Health Inspection
Service (APHIS) controls GMOs through its Biotechnology Regulatory Service, which looks at the impact of the introduction of GMOs on overall plant health (Biotechnology
Regulatory Services 2014). GMOs can be introduced through importation, movement across state borders, or through general release into the environment (Biotechnology
Regulatory Services 2014). Plant pests, meat, poultry, eggs, and animal biologics all fall under the category of GMOs regulated by the USDA (Fish and Rudenko 2001). The authority of the USDA to regulate GMOs comes mainly from the Plant Protection Act.
APHIS uses a system of permits and notifications in order to regulate GMOs. If a
GMO is at risk of being considered a pest to already established plants, it might receive a permit (Permits, Notifications 2014). If a crop fulfills certain conditions, a permit can allow for a field test of the GMO with a thirty-day notice (Farquhar and Meyer 2007). If a
GE plant fulfills the predetermined standards created by the USDA, which include a set of eligibility and performance requirements, it has the option to receive a notification instead of a permit (Permits, Notifications 2014). Finally, if it can be determined that the
GE plant offers no risk to other plants, a petition may be filed with APHIS in order to obtain a nonregulated status (Biotechnology Regulatory Services 2014).
EPA- The EPA’s role in biotechnology regulation concerns the use of pesticides in relation to GMOs. Regulation by the EPA includes Plant Incorporated Protectants
88 (PIPs), plants and animals producing toxic substances, microorganisms, and pesticides
(Fish and Rudenko 2001). What this means is that the EPA does not actually regulate the plant as a whole, but rather it regulates the specific protein or DNA that is being injected
(Plant Incorporated Protectants 2014). The two laws that relate to GE pesticide concerns are the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) and the Toxic
Substances Control Act (TSCA) (Farquhar and Meyer 2007). FIFRA gives the EPA the authority to regulate pesticides in general, and pesticidal DNA in GMOs specifically
(EPA’s Regulation 2012).
The EPA completes a number of studies in order to determine the safety of the new GE crop. These studies look at factors such as impact on human, environment, and other organisms, gene flow, and insect resistance (Plant Incorporated Protectants 2014).
If the product passes the EPA inspection, it is determined that the PIP involved is relatively safe for humans and the environment, when used properly (Plant Incorporated
Protectants 2014). The proper use of the pesticide is set by the tolerance levels set by the
EPA, as mandated under the FD&C Act. Since 2005, twelve PIPs have been registered with the EPA (EPA’s Regulation 2012).
FDA’s Stance on Labeling
In 1996, the FDA stated its intent to discourage the mandatory labeling of GMOs
(Bauer and Gaskell 2001). Due to pressure from a number of different constituent groups though, the FDA released a guidance document relating to voluntary labeling in the US.
The FDA currently mandates that labeling be included on a product if the specific characteristic or change represents a “material” difference. This relates to health risks, environmental risks, misleading statements, or cases where a lack of label would cause a
89 consumer to think that that a product has certain nutritional or other characteristics when it does not (Guidance for Industry 2014). This does not generally apply to GMOs however, because the FDA does not see the difference between GE and conventional food to be a material difference. The FDA does make special note of the requirement that
GE products should be labeled if the nutritional or allergen information is significantly different (Guidance for Industry 2014).
Relating specifically to labeling guidance, the FDA states first that GMOs should be labeled with the term “genetically modified” or “genetically engineered” rather than the acronym, as many consumers do not understand what GMO or GE stands for
(Guidance for Industry 2014). In addition, the term “free” should generally be avoided due to the fact that the FDA has not established a safe threshold level, and most products have experienced at least a minimal amount of genetic engineering (Guidance for
Industry 2014). Third, the FDA states that the label should not include information that would lead the consumer to think that GMOs are inherently unsafe, or that non- genetically modified products are inherently better. Labeling something as GMO-free when it is a product that has never been genetically modified is also seen as misleading
(Guidance for Industry 2014). Supported examples of labeling include “We do not use ingredients that were produced using biotechnology” or “This oil is made from soybeans that were not genetically engineered” (Guidance for Industry 2014).
As can be seen from many of the products in grocery stores today, most GMO- free companies do not strictly adhere to the guidance of the FDA. Because this guidance is for voluntary and not mandatory labeling, there is no current mandate requiring that companies use these tips, and companies are able to label in varying ways. Therefore,
90 while some companies may choose to label their products, especially if it is seen as beneficial to their business model, the lack of enforcement mechanism could lead to consumer confusion over what products do or do not include GMOs.
State of Labeling
Given the lack of a federal enforcement mechanism, the United States has been experiencing a recent surge in state activity relating to GMO labeling, with around 26 states having current or past GMO legislation, as demonstrated in Figure 8 (Map 2014).
While some labeling efforts have been in the works since GMOs were first introduced in the United States, much of the state legislative action began to pick up around 2012.
Current GMO labeling efforts have not been equally spread out across the country. There have been significant clusters of activity in the western half of the US (Washington,
Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico), the eastern coast
(Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New
York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland), and a portion of the Midwest (Minnesota, Iowa,
Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana). Alaska, Hawaii, Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee have also experienced labeling efforts (Map 2014). There is a noticeable lag in labeling activity through much of the Rocky Mountain west, central region, and south. While this analysis includes a few examples of legislation that are proposed for 2014, it focuses mainly on current and past legislative efforts.
91 Figure 8: American States with Proposed Labeling
Source: Adapted from Map. (2014). Right to Know-GMO. Retrieved, 2014, from http://www.righttoknow-gmo.org/states
Due to the extensive nature of the proposed legislation, I will not be covering every state individually. Instead, I will cover states that have experienced relative success and a set of states that has experienced relative failure. The states included in the success category are Maine and Connecticut and the states included in the failure category are
California and Washington.
Successful Labeling Movements at the State Scale
On June 3, 2013, Connecticut became the first state to pass GMO labeling legislation (Robinson 2013). Connecticut has had two bills of note regarding labeling efforts: H.B. 6519 concerning the labeling of genetically engineered food, and H.B. 6519
92 concerning the labeling of genetically modified baby food (Map 2014). H.B. 6519 requires mandatory labeling of food with GE ingredients, GE seeds, and seed stock
(Gallagher 2013). Specifically, this means that GE products should be labeled with the phrase “Produced with Genetic Engineering” (Benson 2013). This includes processed product labels, as well as bins or containers of raw food (Dooley 2014). There are a couple of exemptions under the law, however, including food sold in restaurants or at farmers’ markets and alcoholic beverages (Gallagher 2013). This bill passed the House with a vote of 134-3 and passed in the Senate with a unanimous vote (Hansen 2013).
For many, the passing of Connecticut’s legislation is seen as a very significant step for the labeling movement in the US. Governor Daniel P. Malloy, who signed the bill into law, stated, “This is a beginning, and I want to be clear what it is a beginning of.
It is a national movement that will [require food] labeling” (Hansen 2013).
Representative Tony Hwang, another supporter of the legislation, stated that the success of the legislation was due largely to the support of the activist base, with his office receiving over 45,000 emails in support of labeling (Dooley 2014).
Though the passage of GMO labeling laws in Connecticut represents an important victory for the anti-GMO movement, many believe that the provisions that were added to the laws considerably limit their impact. In order for the mandatory labeling to go into effect, at least four other states in the region must pass similar legislation (Gallagher
2013). This area must include a population of at least 20 million (Benson 2013). In addition, at least one of the states must border Connecticut (Benson 2013). The states that are included under this provision are Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts,
Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey (HP 0490 2013). This cluster of
93 required labeling legislation is demonstrated in Figure 9. Already, Maine has passed labeling legislation, and many other states in that group have been working on legislation as well (Gallagher 2013).
Figure 9: Northeast Labeling Cluster
Maine became the second state to pass GMO labeling legislation with L.D. 718, entitled “An Act to Protect Maine Food Consumers’ Right to Know about Genetically
Engineered Food and Seed Stock.” This bill was passed into a law on June 12, 2013, just days after Connecticut’s bill was passed (Hansen 2013). It was passed through the House of Representatives with a vote of 141-4 and through the Senate with a unanimous vote
(MOFGA’s Right 2013). Similar to the legislation in Connecticut, Maine’s Right to
94 Know Act requires other states to pass comparable legislation before it goes into effect
(23).
Based on the experiences of Connecticut and Maine, as well as the presence of a large number of other states with proposed legislation in the area, there seems to be a growing call for GMO labeling in the northeast. However, many worry about the ability of labeling to obtain long-term success. The first concern is the nature of the legislation so far, which has come with caveats requiring additional states to pass legislation in order to go into effect. Though two states have passed legislation, citizens will not experience a change in their local labeling until other states require it (Gallagher 2013). Also, the border-sharing requirement in Maine would essentially give New Hampshire the power to nullify Maine’s law (Stone 2013).
A second concern stems from the unclear distinction between state, federal, and corporate rights regarding GMO labeling laws. Some states have expressed fear that the passage of a labeling law would result in legal backlash from Monsanto (Maine Dems
2013). In the past year, Vermont, which was prepped to become the first state to pass a labeling law, halted efforts after Monsanto threatened to sue the state if the bill passed
(Monsanto Threatens 2012). Specifically, the constitutional issue has to do with companies’ freedom of speech regarding ingredient lists (Mistler 2013). By forming a coalition of states, many governments hope to have a better chance of paying the cost that would come from legal action (Stone 2013). Representative Lance Harvell of Maine said of this risk, “Are we going to give these people veto power over this body and the people of the state of Maine? Do we really live in a world where they have more power than our federal government? It’s a question we should ask” (Mistler 2013). Although labeling
95 appears to be gaining momentum in a number of states, the legal environment may limit its effectiveness.
Unsuccessful Movements at the State Scale
California’s battle with GMO legislation is well documented, as it was one of the earliest attempts at such a law and is said to have inspired a resurgence of activist efforts relating to labeling. Proposition 37, also known as the California Right to Know
Genetically Engineered Food Act, was set into motion after 971,126 signatures were collected from the public (Hansen 2013). This number represents almost double the amount required to make use of the initiative system in California (Andrews 2012).
Under the initiative process, once a certain amount of signatures have been collected, an issue is added to the ballot for the next election (What are Ballot 2013). California has had prior success with ballot initiatives, including the 2004 initiative in Mendocino
County that aimed to ban GMOs (Pechlaner 2012).
Proposition 37 was relatively similar to the bills introduced in Connecticut and
Maine. It would have required labeling for food products and raw materials, with labels stating “genetically engineered,” “partially produced with genetic engineering,” or “may be partially produced with genetic engineering” (Dahl 2012). Also similar to the later labeling bills, Proposition 37 would have had exemptions, including meat, dairy, food in restaurants, and alcohol (Dahl 2012). This law would have been enforced through one of two measures: through regulation by the California Department of Public Health or through state, local, or private litigation (Ling and Lakatos 2013).
Prior to the election, a lot of support was shown for the ballot initiative, with polls continuously showing around a 70 percent acceptance rate (McFadden and Lusk 2013).
96 However, as Election Day approached, the percentage in favor of labeling dropped significantly (Wachtler 2012). After the voting finished on November 7, 2012, it was reported that Proposition 37 had failed, receiving only 48.6 percent of the votes (GMO
Inside 2013). The results of this proposition can be seen in Figure 10. A study completed during and after the election showed that the percentage of people expecting to vote yes
(75.4%) for the initiative was significantly higher than the percentage of people who did vote yes (47.1%) (McFadden and Lusk 2013).
Figure 10: California Proposition 37 Results
Source: McFadden, B. R. & Lusk, J. L. (2013). Effects of Cost and Campaign Advertising on Support for California's Proposition 37. Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 38(2), 174-186.
Support for Proposition 37 came mainly from organic companies, consumer groups, and alternative medicine groups (Finz 2012). The largest contributors to the pro- labeling movement, including Mercola Health Resources, Kent Whealy, Nature’s Path
Foods, Dr. Bronners Magic Soap, and Organic Consumers Fund, contributed
97 approximately $9.2 million (Lieberman and Gray 2008). Liberal and coastal counties were found to be generally more supportive of GMO labeling (Ling and Lakatos 2013).
The largest contributors to the anti-labeling campaign included Monsanto, Dupont, Pepsi,
Grocery Manufacturers Association, Kraft Foods, BASF, Bayer Crop Science, Dow, and
Syngenta (Lieberman and Gray 2008). Pepsi and Coke both contributed millions of dollars to the cause as well (GMO Inside 2013). Proposition 37 was also opposed by many California newspapers, with around 40 recommending a no vote on the initiative
(Voters Reject 2012). While the estimates vary, it is thought that the anti-labeling coalition spent between $41 and $46 million dollars to defeat the initiative (Ling and
Lakatos 2013).
While it would be hard to pinpoint exactly why Proposition 37 failed, there are a few key elements that stand out in the development of this initiative. The first distinguishing feature is the huge differential in fundraising between the two sides. The anti-labeling group, supported mainly by large food, retail, and chemical companies, spent around five times as much on the campaign as the pro-labeling group. The second weakness stems from the general lack of knowledge of the public regarding the extensiveness of GMO growth. McFadden and Lusk (2013) found that consumers in
California were significantly underestimating the percentage of crops that were GE, as well as the amount of products that contained GE ingredients. Finally, it is thought that advertising played a large role in the defeat of Proposition 37, as much of the change in voter choice seemed to happen so close to the election, when the prevalence of ads was greatest. Anti-labeling ads stated that labels would be bad for business, for research, and
98 for the consumer, as they would be costly and “deceptive” (Westervelt 2012). All of these factors contributed to the defeat of California’s initiative.
Washington’s experience with GMO labeling initiatives was strikingly similar to that of California. Washington’s Initiative 522, “an act relating to disclosure of foods produced through genetic engineering,” was filed in June of 2012 (Initiative Measure
2012). This initiative was introduced after 350,000 signatures were gathered by the citizens of Washington (McLaughlin 2013). I-522 required food products and raw food to be labeled on the front of the package or the bin or container, and would have caused that food to be considered “misbranded” if the label was not included (Initiative Measure
2012). As with the other labeling efforts discussed, exemptions included alcohol, restaurant food, and a few other items (Hopkinson 2013).
Going into the election, the outlook for I-522 was positive. Early polls favored the pro-labeling side with a percentage of around 66, and other items up for debate in the election were proposed to draw a large crowd (Hopkinson 2013). However, as the election drew nearer, the support for I-522 experienced a significant drop, with numbers falling to within 4 percent of the opposition (Hopkinson 2013). Many newspapers were showing their opposition to the initiative, with advertisements characterizing I-522 as expensive and misleading.
The pro-labeling effort spent approximately $7.8 million, and was comprised of
Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, Mercola, Organic Consumer Fund, Presence Marketing, Inc., and a collection of other companies (Cima 2013). Individuals within Washington were understood to have contributed around 30 percent of this amount (Weisse 2013). The anti-labeling side spent around $22 million on efforts to defeat I-522 (Hopkinson 2013).
99 Grocery Manufacturers Association, Monsanto, DuPont, Pioneer, Dow AgroSciences, and Bayer CropScience were the main contributors, with General Mills, Nestle USA, and
PepsiCo also making contributions (Gillam 2013).
After the votes were tallied, it was found that the initiative had lost by a vote of
54.8 percent to 45.2 percent (Weisse 2013). The results of this initiative can be seen in
Figure 11. The anti-labeling coalition may have won the battle in Washington, but it came at a cost. I-522 was the most expensive ballot initiative to ever hit Washington, with opponents spending around $30 for each “no” vote (Johnson 2013). To give this amount context, it is a little over four times the amount that was spent on each vote in
California. As with the battle in California, the general consensus among the public was that the pro-labeling camp was just outspent, with the preponderance of anti-GMO advertising leading to a public that was unsure about the potential costs of labeling and the true benefit to Washington (Gillam 2013). The financial resources of the pro-GMO movement far out-weighs that of the anti-GMO movement and therefore limits the success of state-led labeling campaigns.Though these were significant losses for the anti-
GMO movement, Washington (state) activists are gearing up for more initiative proposals in the future, and numerous other states are considering the introduction of labeling laws.
100 Figure 11: Washington Initiative 522 County Results
Source: http://seattletimes.com/ABPub/2013/11/06/2022198311.gif
Federal Efforts
While much of the GMO labeling efforts in the US have taken place at the state level, there have been some efforts to create a nation-wide regulatory framework that is more stringent than the current labeling stance. In 2013, S. 809, the Genetically
Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act, was introduced by Senator Barbara Boxer into the
Senate (Helme 2013). At the same time, Representative Peter DeFazio introduced H.R.
1699, a companion bill, into the House of Representatives (Helme 2013). Both bills have been referred to a committee for the time being, but H.R. 1699 is currently projected to have a 1 percent chance of being enacted and S. 809 is projected to have a 0 percent chance (H.R. 1699 2013).
Activists see a federal effort as both a positive and a negative change. If a federal regulation were to be passed that would change the current view on GMO regulation to
101 one that requires more transparency in the market, this would give individual states more options for mandatory labeling. A federal mandate would take away some of the financial risk of requiring labels in an individual state, and would also minimize the risk of states being sued for infringing on interstate or federal trade rights. A federal law relating to labeling, though, could lead to the federal government preempting the state governments from tailoring the regulations to the needs of their individual states.
One of the largest arguments that opponents of state labeling regulations have is that a state-by-state method would produce a confusing, piecemeal regulatory arena, in which there would be great confusion over how to deal with interstate trade. This would also cause confusion for companies operating in multiple states. The fear that biotechnology companies have with this method, in addition to its potentially confusing application, is that it could lead to grocery stores eventually deciding not to sell GM products at all as a way to avoid insecurity and protest. This was the case in much of
Europe (Schurman and Munro 2009). Due to this uncertainty, a new coalition has formed, led primarily by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, that is pushing for a change in federal legislation that would put an end to state efforts and would likely be favorable to food and biotech companies (Gillam 2014). This bill is set to be introduced later this year.
Opinion Polls
Numerous polls have demonstrated that there is widespread support for GMO labeling in the United States. These numbers vary a little, but usually come in at around
93 percent, as can be seen in Table 6. These polls show that the majority of the public believes that products that have been genetically engineered should have a label that
102 states their GE nature. If so much of the public alleges to support GMO labeling, it is curious that voting initiatives, which depend upon the opinions of the public instead of the opinions of elected officials, have thus far achieved very little success. As will be discussed in greater depth later, this phenomenon is caused by a number of factors, including lobbying and advertising efforts, consumer knowledge about GMOs, willingness to pay for non-GMO products, and a host of other factors.
Table 7: USA Labeling Polls Newspaper Support New York Times 93% think foods containing genetically engineered ingredients (7/27/13) should be identified HuffPost/ YouGov 82% think GMO foods should be labeled Poll (3/4/13) Mellman Survey 91% favor the FDA require GE foods to be labeled as such (3/22/12) ABC News 93% think the federal government should require GE labels on food (2/25/11) Reuters/ NPR 93% believe all GE foods should be labeled as such (10/10) Washington Post 94% voted “Yes, I have a right to know what I’m eating” in an internet poll (9/17/10) Consumer Reports 95% think food from GE animals should be labeled (11/11/08)
Source: Adapted from http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/issues/976/ge-food- labeling/us-polls-on-ge-food-labeling Global GMO Labeling
103 GMO labeling has been on the rise across the world, with many countries choosing to adopt some form of either voluntary or mandatory labeling. Presently, at least
40 countries have labeling efforts in place, and the Center for Food Safety estimates that
64 countries around the world currently have some form of mandatory GE labeling
(Gruére and Rao 2007; International Labeling 2014). This count does not factor in countries that have voluntary labeling. The most intense form of mandatory labeling, mandatory labeling of all foods with a threshold of 0.9 to 1 percent, is found in the
European Union, Russia, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greenland, Australia, and
New Zealand (International Labeling 2014). The labeling standards of each country can be seen in Figure 12. Shades of darker green represent stricter labeling thresholds and mandatory labeling of more products.
Figure 12: Global GE Food Labeling Laws
104 Source: http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/issues/976/ge-food-labeling/international-labeling- laws# Though there has been an abundance of countries choosing to label GMOs, the specific characteristics of the labeling laws have varied from country to country. The main issue with respect to labeling is whether labels are voluntary or mandatory.
Mandatory labels require that a product have some statement demonstrating that the product was genetically engineered or has an ingredient that was produced with genetic engineering. On the other hand, voluntary labeling allows a product to demonstrate that it was produced without genetic engineering (to the best of the company’s knowledge).
Labeling can also differ according to what products and ingredients are included in the coverage of the labeling, as well as what product or ingredient exemptions are in place. A third category of variation is whether the labeling regulations apply to the end product or the production process (Gruére and Rao 2007). Finally, labeling can differ as far as the threshold levels that are set for acceptable amounts of GMO contamination, with current levels ranging from zero to five percent (Phillips and McNeill 2000). The extent of labeling regulations in a country can be divided into the introduction of labeling regulation as well as the actual enforcement of the regulations (Gruére and Rao 2007).
Some general trends have been found regarding international GMO labeling differences. Developing countries are usually found to have less GMO labeling than more developed countries (Gruére and Rao 2007). Even when developing countries have some form of labeling, actual enforcement of the regulations can be difficult, as these countries do not always have the necessary infrastructure to enforce the regulation, and are sometimes acting on issues in a way that aligns more with international conflict than internal opinion regarding GMOs (Gruére, Carter, and Farzin 2009). When comparing the
105 countries that are currently growing GMOs to the countries with labeling procedures, it does not appear that there is any strong correlation between the two. However, it may be that countries are reacting to a threat from a current trading partner. It was found that labeling regulations are more likely to be impacted by a country’s importation practices than its exportation practices (Gruére, Carter, and Farzin 2009). This is one reason why a country such as the US, which exports a lot of GMOs, does not have mandatory labeling, while a country that imports food from the US might have more stringent labeling requirements. Countries that rely more on agriculture as a commodity have also been found to exhibit less mandatory labeling (Gruére, Carter, and Farzin 2009). Lastly, countries with labels based on production processes are more likely to evaluate their products based on factors unrelated to health, such as environmental, religious, or ethical beliefs (Gruére and Rao 2007).
Although most labeling requirements are national or regional, a country’s labeling choices may be impacted by the trading standards set by the global community. While there is not an international organization specifically in charge of issues of GMO labeling, the Codex Alimentarius, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, and the World
Trade Organization (WTO) are the three documents and organizations that are most relevant to this issue (Gruére and Rao 2007). The Codex relates to general food labeling requirements, but has not been able to reach a consensus regarding how GMOs should be labeled (Premanandh 2011). However, it does include a number of proposed guidelines for GMO labeling of substantially equivalent food commodities. Some guidelines, such as the ones that relate to allergen content and metabolic impacts, have experienced widespread agreement (Gruére and Rao 2007). The guideline regarding production
106 process, on the other hand, has been more controversial in the eyes of countries that value product over process (Gruére and Rao 2007). The Cartagena Protocol, which deals with biosafety in trade relations, advises that countries provide information on whether their exported goods do contain or may contain living modified organisms (LMOs) (Gruére and Rao 2007). It has been opposed by industrial and biotech-centric countries for its relative precautionary stance and protection of the regulatory powers of importers (Meyer
2007). The WTO has been a center of controversy for GMO disputes between countries for issues relating to labeling and bans alike. Under the WTO, there is debate regarding the legality of mandatory labeling regulations, as they can be seen to impinge on trading rights (Gruére and Rao 2007). Still, mandatory labeling for health and safety purposes, and potentially for environmental purposes, may be covered under the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement) (Morgan and Goh 2004). Due to the highly debated nature of GMO safety, this argument does not currently have a lot of traction.
Because of their strong stance on mandatory labeling, the EU stands out as an important region of contrast to the US, and is generally thought of as comprising the opposite end of the labeling spectrum. Showing results similar to those found in the US,
Eurobarometer polls have found that approximately 94.6 percent of EU citizens want
“the right to choose what product they are buying” (Loureiro 2003:18). However, EU authorities have chosen to regulate and label GMOs to a much more intense level than in the US. Much of this regulatory power comes from Directive 90/220, The Novel Foods and Food Ingredients Act and Directive 97/35/EC, which requires the labeling of products containing GE ingredients (Phillips and McNeill 2000). The EU has a threshold
107 value of 0.9 percent, which is the amount of GE material that can exist in non-GE products if the producer can show that the GMO contamination was unavoidable (Ling and Lakatos 2013).
Labeling within the EU is often seen as a sign of where the US could go with its labeling efforts, should it obtain success. Though this may be the goal of activists, the labeling situation and history within the EU has been very different than the labeling efforts in the United States. The EU has been known for its precautionary stance on
GMOs since the technology’s inception, and therefore used mandatory labeling in combination with its prior moratorium on GMOs (Ling and Lakatos 2013). Contrary to the US’s labeling history, which was triggered mostly by activist protest, the EU received a huge boost from the actions of the supermarket chains in the region, which began to voluntarily label or ban GMOs (Herrick 2005). In addition, the EU’s labeling policy has been found to be propelled by the desires of consumers and is therefore demand-based, while the US’s policy has been formed according to the desires of biotechnology and food industry groups, and is therefore supply-based (Herrick 2005).
Case Study: Labeling in the US
The history of food consumption in the US has been fairly politicized, with different food movements waxing and waning in popularity throughout time. These movements have included the local food movement, the slow food movement, the veganism movement, the seasonal movement, and the organics movement, as well as many others. While Americans’ preoccupation with food knowledge and process has undoubtedly been growing over the past few decades, it has scarcely been able to capture the attention of a broader American audience. Frances Moore Lappé stated about the
108 American Food Movement that “some Americans see the food movement as ‘nice’ but peripheral—a middle-class preoccupation with farmers’ markets, community gardens and healthy school lunches” (Lappé 2011).
In the United States, food activism is often thought of as a concept more relevant to the upper classes of society. This is one of the main critiques that is brought up when discussing the anti-GMO movement specifically. The majority of the US activism is consumer based. This creates an important distinction between the US and other active countries, where the battle is often fought by peasants and farmers, and represents a struggle against a powerful multinational corporation.
Consumers in the US tend to value price over quality when it comes to food.
Thus, even though consumers may ethically believe in the importance of consumption choice, this does not mean that they will follow through with that purchasing decision.
Even though polls demonstrate that a large portion of consumers are in favor of GMO labeling, it does not mean that the addition of positive GMO labels would cause all consumers to choose the non-GMO option, especially if there is a cost differential. This comes into play with the idea of consumer willingness to pay (WTP) and accounts for the gap between attitude and behavior in the purchasing of ethical products. This gap is known as the ethical purchasing gap, the attitude-behavior gap, or the 30:3 phenomenon in the UK, which refers to the gap between the 30 percent of consumers stating that they would use ethical characteristics to make purchasing decisions and the 3 percent of the market that is made by ethical purchases such as fair trade (Bray, Johns, and Kilburn
2011). In situations such as in the purchasing of GMOs, a consumer has to decide that purchasing non-GM products is worth the added price. Price can be a hard hurdle for
109 people aiming to make ethical decisions, especially for purchases such as groceries (Bray,
Johns, and Kilburn 2011). Many studies have shown that consumers are willing to pay a certain premium for GMO labels, but that this amount tapers off after the price increase passes a certain point (McFadden and Lusk 2013). Contrary to places such as France, where there is a very strong food culture, the US appears to have a much weaker tie to specific food standards of value.
The concepts of safety and risk are important factors in determining whether a country will accept GMO technology. In general, the US represents a fairly high-risk society in terms of GM food practices. Countries implementing GMO bans or mandatory labeling normally make use of the precautionary principle, and therefore represent a low tolerance for risk. In other words, if there is uncertainty regarding the safety of GMOs, these countries will err on the side of extreme caution. In the US, on the other hand, regulatory bodies have chosen to proceed with the substantial equivalence standard, demonstrating a much higher tolerance for risk. In the case of the US, if there is uncertainty regarding GMO safety but a lack of studies demonstrating probable risk,
GMOs will be seen as relatively safe.
This high tolerance for risk has a lot to do with US citizens’ trust of their regulatory bodies. Because the US government has characterized GMOs as substantially equivalent to conventional agriculture, many citizens feel comfortable consuming them.
The US does have a notably strong regulatory system for food management, with relatively few scandals relating to poor supervision of the food market. In contrast, countries that have experienced more issues with food regulation are likely to be more skeptical of the government’s regulation of GMOs, and might therefore require more
110 strict standards of safety. This has especially been the case in the U.K., where scandals such as the bovine spongiform encephalopathy caused the public to lose faith in its regulatory bodies (Runge, Bagnara, and Jackson 2001).
Also relating to the idea of risk is the idea of how the citizens of each country feel about science and technology, especially in relation to food. In the US, farmers have been especially receptive to seed technology in the past. This has largely been the case with
GMOs. Farmer confidence in GMOs is further strengthened by the fact that most of
Monsanto’s GM products were produced for use in the United States. In other countries,
GMOs have had mixed levels of success, and represent a technology that is a lot more contested with farmers.
Because Monsanto is located in the United States, the US is a main center of support for Monsanto’s products. The general success of GMOs in the US has increased support for Monsanto, which has not had to concern itself with how to best approach the
American market. Monsanto’s experience in other countries has been quite different, where it is often seen as an outside, westernized, industrial power. While American regulators’ insistence that GMOs are scientifically safe has usually worked to assuage the fears of American consumers, it has sometimes done the opposite in other countries, where it is seen as Americans attempting to push their technology (Runge, Bagnara, and
Jackson 2001). However, to many American policy makers, the global anti-GMO movement is seen as being “fed by a potent mixture of scientific irrationalism, economic protectionism, and even anti-U.S. sentiment” (Falkner 2007:100).
As alluded to previously, the anti-GMO movement is often critiqued as being
“anti-science.” This is true of the movement’s manifestations in the United States as well
111 as in other countries. In the US, however, where science and technology are held to a high level of esteem and tactics such as assembly line production and mechanized farming have been actively promoted throughout history, the accusation of being anti- science is seen as a heavy blow to the credibility of the anti-GMO movement. Kelly
Johnston of the US National Food Processors Association stated that giving in to activists’ labeling demands “is bad public policy; the laws and regulations governing food safety must be based on sound, modern science, not politics” (Klintman 2002:80). If science is privileged as the ultimate factor for the determination of genetic engineering’s usefulness to society, than activists questioning the safety of GMOs or attempting to make use of non-science frames in their arguments are likely to find little success.
Central to the issue of American regulation of GMOs is the close relationship between farmers, food manufacturers, and politicians. Monsanto, a chemical and seed company, has many projects taking place in research institutions, sells its products to
American farmers, and lobbies both in the public and to politicians for the right to grow
GMOs and to have them remain unlabeled. As can be seen from this demonstration, this relationship effectively integrates most, if not all, links in the chain of food production and consumption. Food lobbies have a history of being particularly effective in the
United States, with one estimate suggesting that these groups have spent $547 million on lobbying efforts between the years of 1999 and 2009 (Zacune 2012).
Of notable importance to the labeling effort is the power of the American supermarket, and the role that it has played in the opposition of labeling efforts. In areas such as the UK, there are only a few large supermarket chains so the companies are easier to target. Therefore, should consumers decide that they want GMOs labeled or want to
112 boycott them altogether, a supermarket might face serious implications if it is the only one that does not follow through with these changes. This may account for why so many supermarkets in the UK decided to voluntarily label or ban GMOs. In the US, on the other hand, there is much wider variety of supermarkets and several local regional chains, making it far more difficult to target the supermarkets. Supermarkets in the US therefore have a lot more power to set price and quality standards as they want.
Though some stores and food brands have felt the pressure from activists to adopt more GMO-free practices, others have been very active in the labeling opposition efforts.
Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have been notable for their steps to either label GMOs or remove them entirely from their products. However, these stores generally represent niche food markets anyway, so it is likely that a switch to GMO-free products would be supported by many of their consumers. The Grocery Manufacturers Association, as mentioned previously, has been an ardent force in the opposition of labeling, and along with food production companies such as Pepsi, Coke, and Kraft, has contributed financially to the defeat of labeling initiatives.
As has been shown, the labeling efforts in the US have taken place at multiple scales. This theme is consistent with every resistance tactic that is used in the US. For labeling, this means that there were local, statewide, and national efforts to establish a labeling regime. This multi-scale effort has the potential to garner a lot of support at multiple levels, but sometimes works to the disadvantage of smaller scale groups. In the case of labeling, a national labeling policy could undermine the efforts of statewide groups, or a state effort could draw so much negative attention from the media that it could [negatively change] the public outlook on a future federal effort.
113 There have been many frames implemented in the US anti-GMO movement. In terms of the labeling branch of activism, the framing has been consistently based on the concept of the consumer’s right to know. This “right to know” motto has been prevalent in the titles of many of the state and national labeling bills, which symbolizes the power of this idea as the main doctrine of the movement. While safety and a general anti-GMO frame have been implemented, the major foundation of this movement manifestation is the belief that the consumer has a right to information, transparency, and participation within the regulatory and consumer environment (Roff 2007). Information regarding the potential harmful effects of GMOs has been made available, but the main thrust of the movement has been that increasing information regarding GM content will empower the consumer to make more knowledgeable decisions.
The goals of the right to know movement are to encourage the use of voluntary labeling and eventually pass legislation that will require the mandatory labeling of all products. Some activists may have the eventual goal that supermarkets will stop carrying
GM products due to consumer preference, but the overall goal is simply to get the labels on the products. Success with this tactic would include the use of voluntary labels on more products, the passing of state legislation requiring mandatory labeling, the development of a national standard for mandatory labeling, and the increase of consumer knowledge regarding GMO content. Basically, the United States hopes to follow a model similar to the UK or many of the other countries that have implemented mandatory labeling.
A number of assumptions underlie the right to know tactic—1) that consumers want to know whether GM ingredients are in their food; 2) that consumers do not already
114 have knowledge regarding GMOs; 3) that consumers will make decisions based on GM content; and 4) that consumers will choose not to buy GMOs therein “voting with their dollar.” Collectively, there is an underlying assumption that these purchasing decisions will lead to structural changes. The validity of these assumptions will be discussed.
Regarding the first two assumptions, there has been debate over whether GMO labels would actually provide the consumer with more information. Many people believe that if a consumer wants to buy non-GM food, he or she should just buy organic because organic food in the US cannot be genetically modified. This does not however take into account the people who wish to buy non-GMO non-organic products. In a market where approximately 80 percent of packaged foods have GM ingredients, and the other 20 percent includes organic and voluntarily labeled products, it could be possible to make educated guesses about which products contain GMOs. The third assumption gets at the issue of high cost of GM-free products and the fact that not everyone may feel that they have the flexibility in their budget to make ethical choices. Even if people do have the ability to pay for ethical choices, the attitude-behavior gap demonstrates that this does not necessarily mean that they will. Whether this tactic will in fact lead to structural changes depends upon the movement’s ability to draw the support of a larger consumer and political base.
America’s dependence on labeling as the primary mode of activism demonstrates its citizens’ belief in the power of democracy through consumerism. Robin Roff (2007) stated that “with the increasing globalization, industrialization, and concentration of
North America’s food supply it is the consumer not the citizen who is often called upon to bring forth a more socially sustainable and environmentally just commodity system”
115 (511). One of the primary features of the American anti-GMO resistance is its commitment to working within the system.
A reliance on capitalist activism has a few key downsides. By working within a capitalist structure, some argue that activists make no strides toward changing the food production system in itself. Even if labeling efforts should pass, the ultimate decision of whether or not to supply GMOs falls to the supermarket. Consumers can choose not to buy GM products, but this choice will not necessarily impact the underlying structure of food production. In addition, the reliance on consumerism leaves out a significant portion of society, which cannot afford to purchase higher priced goods.
The anti-GMO movement in the US is sold as a movement for increased transparency, knowledge, and consumer choice. Whether mandatory labeling actually encourages freedom of choice is highly debated. Looking to the situation in Europe, where many supermarkets chose to ban GMOs rather than face potential consumer boycotts, the outcome of labeling was an environment of fewer choices. Mandatory labeling effectively took most GM products out of the marketplace altogether. If the goal of protest is to enact structural change and alter the US stance on GMOs in the marketplace, mandatory labeling would be encouraged, even at the potential expense of consumer choice.
What Does this Mean for Food Politics and Resistance?
The anti-GMO movement in the United States has been primarily a consumer- based movement. The frames have centered on consumers’ right to know, the tactics have been based on the power of ethical consumption, and the actors have been comprised of voters and shoppers. In the US, there is currently a fairly large intellectual property rights
116 battle being waged between Monsanto and American farmers, but this fight has not caught the attention of the general public as much as the fight for labeling. The push for consumer-based solutions to food production issues has been consistent for many food movements. With an increase in farmers’ markets, organic labeling, and geographical origin labeling, consumers have been given greater opportunities to make consumption decisions that align with their ethics.
The organic food movement has had notable success with creating fairly rigorous standards and increased labeling, but has represented a method more similar to voluntary
GMO labeling, as processed foods are generally labeled as “organic” rather than
“conventional.” The battle over rBST labeling followed a similar trajectory, with milk producers initially staunchly resisting labeling. Eventually many producers agreed to use an rBST-free label with a caveat stating that milk produced from cows treated with growth hormones is not known to be significantly different. The addition of this label, however, has done little to change milk consumption patterns (Runge and Jackson 2000).
Recent efforts to make use of “cage-free” or “free-range” egg labels have experienced similar levels of success (Anderson 2011).
Social movements relating to food have the ultimate goal of deconstructing the embeddedness of food production and relations. These movements represent an effort to reengage the public with the debate over how food should be produced in the American marketplace. Consumers are frequently not privy to information regarding production procedures, and many times are unable to state where their food comes from or how it was made. From the local movement to the organic movement, food movements push for consumers to begin to seek out this information.
117 While this is a valuable goal, the experience within the anti-GMO movement in the US has demonstrated that activists using labeling- and consumer-based approaches are not effectively working to change the underlying structures of society. By working within the system, activists are reaffirming the value of the current economic and food model. Increasing consumer knowledge regarding GMO content does little to challenge the dominance of Monsanto in the marketplace, to increase benefits for small local farmers, or to demand that big agriculture consider the environmental impact of its practices. Also, by using consumer-based approaches, the movement implies that it should be the consumer, rather than the system, that pays the premium for GMO-free foods.
For the average consumer to agree to pay the premium for local, organic, or
GMO-free food, Americans need to begin to challenge the way that they feel regarding the value of food. Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any other country in the world, with food expenditures averaging at around six percent of income (Battistoni 2012). Studies have shown that in a post-recession world, most consumers will cut back on ethical and green consumption (Flatters and Willmott 2009).
Until American consumers change their perspective on the monetary value of ethical food, it is unlikely that a consumer-based strategy will be supported by the majority of the public.
118 Chapter 5: Moratoria: The Mexican Case Study
In Mexico, debate over industrial agricultural methods has steadily increased since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 (McAfee 2008).
This debate has centered on the potential risks and values of industrial agriculture as a whole, and later, on the potential impact of GMOs specifically. Mexico has had a varied response to GMOs, with some crops obtaining greater levels of support than others.
Many people in Mexico, including much of the activist population, would not characterize their opinions as strictly anti-GMO, but rather as pro-GMO in certain situations and anti-GMO in others. This division has a lot to do with the specific crops being grown, the amount of regulation in place, and the socioeconomic impact that GMO growth will cause.
Importance of Maize
Upon the detection of genetic material in maize fields in Oaxaca, Greenpeace
Mexico announced a situation of “national security” (Fitting 2010). As a center of diversity for maize, Mexico has seen particularly high levels of controversy regarding the introduction of GM maize into the country. Maize makes up around 50 percent of all cropland in Mexico (McAfee 2008). Of this area, a large majority is comprised of landrace or local varieties that have been cultivated throughout history in order to develop particularly beneficial traits for their specific environments (Irish Landraces
2012). The cultivation of landrace maize represents centuries of indigenous farming knowledge, and has remained stable even in times where the benefits of growing maize have only minimally outweighed the costs (McAfee 2008).
119 The importance of maize to Mexico can be divided into four categories: practical, national, cultural, and genetic. Practical concerns relate to the value that maize has as a source of income and personal nutrition. According to McAfee (2008), maize provides income for around three million families in Mexico, and makes up two-thirds of the calories consumed by citizens. Maize is a significant part of the Mexican diet and has a wide variety of uses, with nearly all parts of the crop being utilized in some communities
(Fitting 2013). The tortilla, a maize-based product, is eaten with every meal, and has gastronomic importance for families within and outside of Mexico (Zentella 2013). For most Mexicans, not a day goes by without eating corn.
Maize has national importance for Mexico as well. Due to the high number of varieties of maize, with approximately 59 types grown in the country, Mexico is seen as a main center of maize growth (Wainwright and Mercer 2009). Activists have gone as far as to say, “without corn, there is no country” (Fitting 2010:66). Whereas wheat is seen as a symbol of white Europeans in Mexico, maize is seen as a symbol of national Mexican identity, and the racial diversity that that implies (Fitting 2013). In expressing this theme, activists have also pointed to the importance of internal food sovereignty, and the risk that external influence has brought to this idea. GMOs represent a potential loss of land to those who can no longer afford the technology, as well as a loss of traditional agricultural methods, which may not be able to be reclaimed in the future.
The issue that has been of primary importance in the GMO debate has been the importance of maize as a cultural identity. Maize has great historical significance to indigenous groups and peasant, or campesino, groups. Due to the importance of maize to many local traditions, the introduction of a GM variety is seen as a risk to indigenous and
120 campesino culture. This high value that is placed on Mexican culture is the reason why many activist arguments are framed in cultural terms, and why the risk that GMOs pose to Mexican culture is seriously considered in assessments of the technology.
The final importance that maize has in Mexico is the value that it provides as a center of genetic diversity. Mexican activists have pushed for the preservation of landrace maize both in situ, in the fields, and ex situ, in the seed and germplasm banks. This push for preservation has been aided by the portrayal of maize landraces as a “common heritage of humanity [for which] countries have to assume responsibilities for their preservation” (Antal and Tigau 2008:39).
Much of the anti-GMO controversy in Mexico stemmed from a study published in
2001 that found the presence of transgenic material in Oaxacan corn (Fitting 2013). This study took place in 2000, and tested criollo maize in four fields for evidence of gene flow from genetically modified maize (Quist and Chapela 2001). The results of the study were particularly troublesome to the community due to the presence of a moratorium on GM maize growth that was in place during the time of the research (Mercer and Wainwright
2008). This moratorium should have prevented the presence of GMOs in the area. Since the initial study, around ten additional analyses have been carried out in an attempt to disprove the findings of Quist and Chapela, and while certain aspects of the original study have been critiqued, the overall presence of transgenes has not been disproved
(Mercer and Wainwright 2008).
Regardless of the validity of the 2001 study, the potential for genetic material to enter the GMO-free fields in Mexico drew a lot of concern from many different activist and citizen groups. In addition to an outright ban on GMOs, activists called for the
121 “decontamination” of maize landraces in Mexico- one of corn’s domestication centers
(Mercer and Wainwright 2008). This call for decontamination brings up a number of interesting features of the anti-GMO movement in Mexico. Specifically, it demonstrates a reliance on science and a belief that scientific and regulatory methods are important for the control of GMOs. The call for additional papers proving or disproving the initial study, as well as the public’s willingness to accept the results of a study completed by environmental scientists, shows the citizens’ valuation of scientists as the primary authority. This is counter to the opinions of many other anti-GMO groups, and lends a sense of international credibility to the movement. Mercer and Wainwright (2007) state that the Mexican citizenry may have had too much faith in the abilities of their scientific and regulatory bodies, stating that “the call for ‘decontamination’ presumes that it is possible to know and verify that such complete removal has occurred…farmers and conservationists may well desire precise answers that science cannot presently provide”
(5).
GMO Growth and Bans in Mexico
Permits for GMO field trials in Mexico were approved as early as 1988 (Fitting
2010). These permits were allowed for crops such as potatoes, tomatoes, canola, alfalfa, maize, cotton, and soybean (Fitting 2010). According to ISAAA, Mexico was one of the
“founder biotech crop countries,” and is currently the sixteenth largest producer of biotech crops, with a growth area of around 200,000 hectares (James 2012:153). Cotton has made up the largest share of GMO growth in Mexico, but maize has induced the most public skepticism (James 2012). Despite Mexico’s anti-GMO controversy, it has
122 experienced a relatively steady increase in GMO production, with larger increases occurring in 2004 and 2011 (James 2012).
In 1998, two years after the global commercialization of GMOs, Mexico enacted a moratorium on transgenic maize (McAfee 2008). This moratorium applied to the growth of GM varieties of maize, but did not apply to the importation of maize from other countries, such as the United States (Fitting 2010). The distinction between growth and importation is important because, since the passage of NAFTA, Mexico began to import large quantities of maize from the US, much of which was GM and unlabeled
(Fitting 2010). During the later contamination scandal, the presence of GM maize from the United States was listed as a potential cause (Mercer and Wainwright 2008).
The 1998 moratorium was enacted for two main reasons. First, many activists argued that GM maize development was unimportant for Mexico due to the fact that most of the initial GM crops were modified to include insecticide for pests that were not present in Mexico. Relating to this issue, one scientist stated, “promoters of biotech say how wonderful it is that Bt corn was found in Oaxaca because it’s going to help peasants.
But this is incorrect because in Mexico we don’t have the pests that Bt was designed to attack” (Fitting 2013:12). The second and more serious issue that activists had with GM maize was the potential that it provided for contamination of local varieties of maize
(Fitting 2010). This fear was realized in 2001 with the aforementioned contamination findings. Silvia Ribiero, Latin American Director of the Action Group on Erosion,
Technology and Concentration (ETC Group), summed up the apprehension regarding
GMOs by stating “there is no country in the world with GM crops that has not been
123 contaminated. The contamination is inevitable and therefore intentional” (Ruiz-Marrero
2007:6).
The moratorium on GM maize was finally terminated in 2009, 11 years after its implementation (James 2012). The end of the moratorium led to the development of test plots for GM maize in parts of Mexico, with around 21 field trials carried out as of 2012
(James 2012). However, in October of 2013, this status changed once again when a federal court in Mexico ruled in favor of anti-GMO activists, thereby reinstating a ban on field trials and growth of GM maize in Mexico (Acción Colectiva 2013). Just like the previous moratorium, this ruling does not affect the importation of GM maize (Huff
2013). It is also considered to be a temporary measure, although activists are hoping to turn it into a permanent ban (Upton 2013).
The central focus of this case study is Mexico’s banning efforts in relation to maize, but Mexico has also experienced another recent victory in the form of a moratorium on GM soybeans in Campeche. This ruling occurred two years after three
Mayan communities brought the issue to court (Mayans Win 2014). Interestingly enough, the Mayan petitioners invoked a strategy similar to that of the maize campaign in order to garner public support. This strategy hinged on the cultural importance of the practice of beekeeping in the region, and the impact that GM soybeans could have on that custom
(Mayans Win 2014). The cultural narrative is very resonant in Mexico, and has been found to be a successful way to demonstrate the risk of GMOs, as will be described in greater detail later.
Leaders, Frames, Goals, Success
124 One of the largest actors in the Mexican anti-GMO campaign has been a group known as In Defense of Maize. In Defense of Maize was a group emerging in 2002 as a result of the findings of contaminated maize in Mexico (Fitting 2013). It is a coalition of many different groups of activists, including environmentalists, food activists, peasants, and indigenous rights group (Fitting 2013). Of the many demands provided by the group for both the Mexican and international community, transparency of contamination findings, continuation of the moratorium on GM maize, and the development of plans for better regulation of GMOs are key (Herrera 2005). The first In Defense of Maize forum was seen as a very important step in the anti-GMO movement in Mexico, as it brought together a diverse set of interests, allowed activists to share studies relating to maize contamination, and provided a chance to develop the goals and frame of the movement
(Fitting 2010).
Frames, Goals, Success
Some of the frames, goals, and potential successes for the moratorium tactic can be seen in Table 7. The anti-GMO movement in Mexico has been pretty explicit in its framing of the issue. Similar to the case in France, Mexico has been able to successfully make use of media attention and local meetings in order to engage in frame brokerage activities that focus the platform of the group. The three main frames that have been employed in the Mexican anti-GMO movement are opposition to external involvement, support for indigenous or peasant classes, and protection of genetic resources. Opposition to external involvement includes an anti-industrial agricultural frame, as well as an anti-
GM maize frame specifically. This framing draws on the history with NAFTA and the role that external influence has on internal food sovereignty. Much like the French anti-
125 GMO movement, the Mexican movement has focused largely on the importance of the peasant (and indigenous) class, as mentioned in chapter 3. The final frame has been the idea of protection of genetic resources. This relates to local versions of maize, and to a lesser extent, the biodiversity that is held within seed banks. There is a very real fear in the Mexican anti-GMO movement that the introduction of transgenes will create a situation in which biodiversity is lost without any way to revert to past conditions.
Table 8: Frames, Goals, and Success of Moratoria in Mexico Moratoria Frames Anti-industrial agriculture/ Anti-GM maize; Importance of cultural heritage; Pro-peasantry/Pro- indigenous; Protection of genetic resource; Food sovereignty Goals Encourage local agricultural tradition; Ban GM maize field trials or cultivation; Ban GM maize importation; Admit contamination; Give indigenous or peasantry more control over genetic resources; Stricter standards for contamination; Lessen importation from US Success Increase or steady rate of traditional farming; Moratorium or ban on field trials or cultivation; Moratorium or ban on importation; International or national acknowledgement of contamination; Control over seed banks; Laws with stricter safety standards
Within the movement in Mexico, decontamination of current fields and protection from contamination of future fields have been the main goals. If a total ban is not seen as a possibility, the goal of activists is to get the government to admit that contamination has occurred, and to come up with a way to stop it from occurring in the future. In other words, the goal is to figure out how GM crops and non-GM crops can coexist without one threatening the viability of the other. If a ban is seen as a possibility, then the ultimate goal would be to stop field trials, growth, and importation of GMOs. Importation
126 is an important element due to the previous experience of contamination when imported
GMOs were blamed for transgenes appearing in maize. For much of the Mexican anti-
GMO coalition, the focus is on a maize-specific ban rather than a ban on all GMOs.
Success of the movement will vary depending upon the specific goals of the movement. As stated before, a temporary moratorium may be all that is desired if the moratorium allows time to create a situation in which contamination is no longer an issue. However, as can be seen from the previous moratorium in Mexico, the dissolution of a moratorium can lead to an almost instantaneous development of GMOs without really fixing the initial issues of contention. Also, if the findings show that there is no real way that the two crops can coexist, than an outright ban may be the only true success. An additional success in Mexico could be the continuation of local or indigenous methods, with the peasant class obtaining more control over the genetic diversity.
The Perception of Risk in the Anti-GMO Movement in Mexico
As mentioned previously, activists in Mexico have attempted to use science as a way to demonstrate the potential impacts of GMOs to Mexican crops. In anti-GMO movements around the world, activists have been criticized for being anti-science, and for depending upon scientifically unproven fears. Mexican activists used scientific techniques throughout the campaign to provide legitimacy to their concerns and to challenge the role of American scientists as the primary producers of knowledge. This is not to say that Mexican activists privileged scientific concerns over cultural concerns, but instead that they employed science as a way to frame the issue in terms that would garner international, as well as local, support. Kinchy (2010) stated that “activist use of science may damage the public perception of science as neutral, apolitical, and trustworthy, thus
127 leading to greater skepticism about the capacity of state regulatory agencies” (508). In an arena where the scientific frame was often promoted as the only one worthy of international consideration, activists used studies to legitimize their concerns.
Conception of risk within Mexico can be divided into a risk posed from an outside political force, such as the United States, as well as a risk posed from an outside genetic force, such as GM maize. The first risk deals with the idea of autonomy and food sovereignty. Though this is similar to many of the activist groups discussed in other chapters, the conception of risk for this particular case has been shaped by Mexico’s experience with the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In the past, Mexico has frequently shown support for neoliberal or free trade market tactics. This openness to participation in international agreements led to Mexico’s decision in 1994 to become a member party of NAFTA. As part of this decision, Mexico was forced to liberalize its trade policies, to get rid of tariffs, and to accept an overall neoliberal, globalized agenda (McAfee 2008). The neoliberalization of Mexico’s market led to a restructuring of the agricultural system that pushed farmers to engage in activities that would enhance their “comparative advantage” (Nadal 2006). Due to the difference in yield for corn in Mexico and the United States, Mexico was encouraged to focus on crops other than maize and to begin to import corn from the US. The difference in yield, however, does not take into account the highly varied characteristics of the Mexican landscape that make agricultural production difficult. Nadal (2006) argues that if the government would have considered the importance of local adaptation to issues such as frost, drought, and inadequate soil, traditional maize production in Mexico would have been found to be equally productive.
128 The switch from internal production of maize to external supply from the US had several significant implications for Mexico. Mexico began to import large quantities of maize from the United States, with values increasing by 323 percent after the introduction of NAFTA (McAfee 2008). Although the goal of neoliberalization was to shift Mexican agriculturalists out of the maize producing sector, this was not the reality for many farmers. Owing to a combination of factors such as a lack of ability to produce other crops, an increase in personal maize yield, and the cultural value of maize to famers, a great number of Mexicans continued to grow maize despite the goals of the NAFTA agreement (Patel and Henriques 2004). The importation of US maize into the country led to the introduction of transgenic material into the otherwise GM-maize-free territory, an event which spawned a large public backlash that eventually became the anti-GMO movement in Mexico.
In addition to the problems created for the agricultural market, the changes brought on by NAFTA and other concurrent government decisions led to many negative economic impacts for small farmers. As is often the case with the liberalization of a market, the opening of Mexico’s market led to high levels of job loss, increases in poverty, and a higher Gini index of inequality, with most effects concentrated on small- scale agriculturalists (Antal and Tigau 2008). The negative impacts to farmers in Mexico led to high levels of migration first out of rural areas, and later out of Mexico altogether
(Antal and Tigau 2008).
Although all of the changes in Mexico cannot be attributed to the joining of
NAFTA and the consequent importation of transgenic corn, many of these experiences led to a atmosphere in Mexico that was largely opposed to outside forces and newly
129 committed to campesino and indigenous rights. In comparing with other movements that have been discussed, this development is similar to an anti-globalization frame. However, it is not strictly against international involvement, but rather in favor of a better evaluation of the impact that involvement has on the Mexican way of life.
The risk of outside forces to Mexico’s socioeconomic success has been an important factor in the development of the movement, but the main risk that has been felt in Mexico has been the risk provided to biodiversity through the introduction of transgenic material. Using an actor-network theory lens, GM plants, and the genes that they contain, are feared for the potential that they have to breed with the landrace varieties of maize, thereby threatening practices of local cultivation and seed saving.
Though it is through the efforts of trading partners such as the United States that GM maize is introduced to Mexico, the depiction of the “contamination” of local maize demonstrates a fear of the power of the plant to destroy the landrace varieties. The anti-
GMO movement fears that the GM variety will ultimately take over all agriculture in
Mexico, representing another outside force “colonizing” Mexican agriculture and forcing farmers into an endless cycle of GMO production.
The fear of biodiversity loss is furthered by the possibility that the species being kept in ex situ locations will not be viable forever. In many cases, the specimens kept in locations such as seed or germplasm banks do not contain the full information about how and where each landrace of maize was grown, which leaves out a lot of the information that is necessary for proper production of such location-specific varieties (McAfee 2008).
In the case that farmers would need to return to a GMO-free method of farming, many
130 worry that even if the diversity is being stored in ex situ locations, it might not be possibly to make a complete return to traditional Mexican agriculture.
Comparison to Other Countries in Latin America
Many countries within Latin America have also implemented a temporary or permanent moratorium. Some examples of where bans were enacted include Colombia,
Peru, and Costa Rica. These countries were highlighted in chapter 3 regarding small-scale agriculturalist framing, as they have all made use of their identity as protectors of biodiversity in the anti-GMO movement. In Colombia and Peru, this identity has come from the status of both countries as centers of biodiversity. Costa Rica, on the other hand, is known for its incredibly high level of biodiversity and its promotion of the country as a location for ecotourism.
Colombia’s use of moratoria has consisted mainly of the creation of Transgenic
Free Territories (TFTs). The first are to be declared a TFT was San Andrés de Sotavento
(Fitting 2013). Other TFTs have included resguardos, or reserves, in Cañamomo
Lomapreieta, the Municipio de Natagaima and La Guajira (The Indigenous Communities
2005). In addition to a moratorium on GMOs in resguardos, Colombia still has a ban on
GM maize commercialization throughout the country (The Indigenous Communities).
Peruvian activists have achieved a great level of success in implementing moratoria throughout the country. Before the nation-wide ban, GMO-free regions were declared in 16 out of 25 total governments (Branford 2013). Some GMO-free regions included Cusco, Huánuco, Lambayeque, and San Martín, with Lima notably becoming
GMO-free later on (Gardner 2011). The biggest achievement for the anti-GMO
131 movement came in 2011, when the controversial Supreme Decree 003-2011 was overturned and a 10-year moratorium was put in place in Peru (Ten Year Ban 2012).
As of 2013, Costa Rica has not been able to develop a national moratorium on
GMOs. However, it has made great use of more regional moratoria similar to Peru.
Efforts to develop TFTs in Costa Rica have been focused on the cantón administrative level (subunit of a province). The first cantón to declare itself GMO-free was Paraíso in
2005, but estimates suggest that between 51 and 62 cantóns in Costa Rica are currently
GMO-free, representing a majority of the nation (Lopez 2013). The estimated location of cantóns in Costa Rica can be seen in Figure 13. Contrary to the moratorium that exists in
Mexico, it has been suggested that the moratoria in Costa Rica are more symbolic than restrictive.
Figure 13: Transgenic Free Territories in Costa Rica
Source: Adapted from http://news.co.cr/stay-out-monsanto-costa-rica-is-almost-100-transgenic- free/25046/ . This is an estimation of the territories that have been listed as GMO-free in newspaper articles, and may not be fully representative of GMO-free regions on the ground.
132 Conclusion
In the case of Mexico and the other Latin American countries, moratoria were employed as a way to protect biodiversity and peasant farmers from the impacts of outside political and genetic forces. The moratoria were carried out either through the use of local transgenic free territories or through a national moratorium. Even though a ban can be both a means and an end for an anti-GMO movement, these examples represent clear instances of bans as a tactic. The goal of a moratorium, in many cases, was to leave time to further consider the issue of GMOs. If activists had chosen to employ a direct action technique instead, it would have sent the message that they do not want GMOs in the country for the long term. As many activists were not strictly anti-GMO, but were instead anti-contamination, using a tactic that would destroy the country’s relationship with GMO companies would not have been recommendable. A moratorium, on the other hand, is able to temporarily halt production while a country figures out what it wants its long-term biotechnology policy to be. Also, as can be seen by these case studies, it is rare that a ban is the final solution to a movement. In most cases, governments will not enact a permanent ban as an end to the controversy, thereby making bans more of a temporary tactic.
Possibly the most famous use of a moratorium was the GMO moratorium that was put in place by the European Union from 1999 to 2004. This decision was seen as a way to block unlabeled, genetically modified, American products from entering European countries that had mandatory labeling laws in place (Herrick 2008). The EU moratorium has been argued to be the main inspiration for other countries to attempt a ban. The interesting thing about the EU moratorium was that it was enacted and accepted as strict
133 policy even though there was no official document putting it into place. This makes it a de facto moratorium, or one of a practical nature, rather than a de jure moratorium, one based in law (Lieberman and Gray 2006). The EU’s experience with a de facto moratorium set the precedent that a moratorium can have substantial political power even if it is not upheld of an official document. This standard has been followed by many of the case studies explored here, where TFTs were declared by municipalities and instantly had the power to block out GMOs. By cutting out the judicial or political portion of creating a law, activists employing a de facto moratorium can work at a potentially faster pace than activists hoping to change laws through either direct action or labeling.
Through the case studies examined in this chapter, a number of themes can be deciphered. First, in every country explored, there is a heavy risk frame that is used in the depiction of the GMO experience. This risk is often described either as the risk coming from international powers that are forcing their products on the activists or as the risk coming from GM technology itself, which has the power to contaminate biodiversity in an unplanned way. Another theme that is present in these cases is the importance of a peasant, indigenous, or traditional society. Rather than the conventional frame of indigenous people as a people in need of protection, these groups play an active role in fighting off outside influences. Depicted as “guardians of the potato” or “protectors of biodiversity,” the peasant or indigenous groups in these studies are seen as heroes instead of victims. This peasant activist framing is what was explained in chapter 3.
Several Latin American cases of GMO moratoria demonstrate clear diffusion of tactics from one country to the other. Many of the latter movements have cited that their inspiration both in tactic and in framing came from the experience that Mexico had with
134 maize. By using Mexico as a model, countries were able to draw upon a narrative that many international communities were known to be receptive to, and had a basic outline of how to establish a local moratorium. The individual national campaigns were then able to tailor the moratorium method to fit the specifics of the country. For instance, in some countries a national ban worked better whereas in other countries, bans were required to be more local.
The moratorium tactic is a difficult one to apply to general food movements due to the severity of the stance required against a specific type of food. It is probably best applied to other food movements that have technological aspects, such as the use of rBST or certain pesticides. In order to utilize a ban, a movement must show that the food poses a serious time-sensitive risk to some aspect of the country’s health or culture. In addition, countries have to be wary of the trade agreements that they are a part of, as a ban could be in violation of that. A ban is best implemented in cases where the introduction of a certain food could have irreversible negative impacts on the current food system. This is not the case for many food movements, which deal more with an ethical preference for one type over another. A ban is particularly appropriate for the introduction of GMOs due to the fact that genes in GM crops have the potential to be transferred to conventional varieties of the crop, and that the risk to human health is still feared by many.
The use of a ban has a final potential impact of creating a niche market within a country. In the anti-GMO movement, many countries were hoping to maintain their status as a provider of landrace varieties of crops or to increase their status as organic producers. By creating a moratorium on GMOs, the countries were able to make sure that contamination did not endanger these goals. While there are potential setbacks to being a
135 country that banned GMOs, there is a possibility that these countries could be the only source of biodiverse and GM-free crops in the future, providing an alternative path to international agricultural importance.
136 Chapter 6: Direct Action: The French Case Study
Since the early years of GMO adoption, France has been especially known for its resistance efforts. As a part of the European Union, France has implemented a number of effective and diverse resistance strategies. However, France has also stood out for its statewide actions, and has generally implemented more intense anti-GMO measures than the European Union as a whole. As mentioned previously, France has enacted the highest level of GMO labeling, and has also engaged in banning efforts in the past through its involvement in the EU moratorium of GMOs. What France’s movement has really been known for, though, is its use of direct action efforts, in which activists engage in GM crop destruction. It is this tactic that will be the focus of this chapter.
France was one of the earliest adopters of GMO field trials, with trails occurring as early as 1986 (James 1997). In the early years of GM crop production, France was seen as a promising location for the development of GMOs. This was due largely to the
“confidential, low-profile” nature of regulation of field trials (Bauer and Gaskell
2001:181). During this initial period, debate over GMOs was confined to groups of scientists actually working on GMO development (Pagis 2006). The first decade of development was the heyday for GMO field trials, with France producing the second largest amount of field trials in the world (Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris 2008).
Around the time of preliminary commercialization of GMOs, the controversy over GMOs in general, and GMO field trails in particular, began to gain momentum in
France. In 1996, Greenpeace France tried to block the importation of GM products from the US into France (Seifert 2013). In 1998, a couple of large supermarkets in France,
Carrefour and Leclerc, decided not to sell products with GM ingredients and at least one
137 commune banned GM ingredients from school lunches (Bauer and Gaskell 2001). In the early 2000’s, citizens began to push for more open information regarding field trial locations, and town council meetings and consensus conferences were held to discuss citizen opinions regarding GMOs (Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris 2008). Throughout this time period, the government was debating the proper regulation of GMOs in France, and acts of destructive resistance were being carried out in increasing numbers on field trials across the country.
Regulation was an important pre-cursor to direct action. The two main directives relating to GMO testing and commercialization are directive 90/219 and 90/220, the former of which deals with testing that is contained and the latter of which concerns with release into the environment (Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris 2008). Many regulatory and activist groups have seen GMOs as falling into three categories: those contained in interior experiments, those being tested in outdoor field trials, and those being used for commercialization purposes (Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris 2008).
France practices a precautionary approach when it comes to the regulation of
GMOs, much like the rest of the EU. The presence of numerous health scandals around the time of GMO implementation caused the idea of regulatory robustness to be particularly salient to European citizens. Since its inception in 1995 and later modification to fit GMO-specific issues, the precautionary principle has ignited a lot of debate regarding proper implementation. Largely though court reframing, three aspects of the precautionary principle were evaluated: the extent to which uncertainty would require additional monitoring, the viability of social concerns in the debate, and the issue of risks versus benefits (Marris et al. 2005). The specifics of precautionary regulation are not
138 important for this study, but the use of the precautionary principle over the principle of substantial equivalence is significant because it demonstrates whether countries see
GMOs as equal to conventional varieties or as modifications in need of further regulation.
In France, consumer and scientist concerns regarding the safety of GMOs have led to their regulation under the precautionary principle.
Direct Action As a Tactic
In the work done by Bonneuil et al. (2008), crop destruction is listed as the final phase in France’s protest of GMOs. This “last resort” effort represents a significant shift in France’s framing and tactical approach to resistance from a method working within the system and focusing on citizens’ right to know to one with the goal of fixing the system from the outside (Chesters and Welsh 2011). Crop destruction has been explained by activists to be the only option for resistance against unreasonable GMO laws, with one activist stating, “If the law is unjust then I cannot do anything other than act, non- violently and á visage découvert [openly], collectively, to improve the law” (Doherty and
Hayes 2012b:551). Activists choose to engage in crop destruction because of the contamination risk that GM crops can pose to their non-GM counterparts (Hayes 2007).
The characteristics described previously for direct action or civil disobedience have been strongly employed in the French interpretation of direct action, as an emphasis has been placed on non-violence, transparency, and accountability (Seifert 2013). In order to obtain success, an activist group implementing a direct action approach must maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Some protestors of GMOs find direct action tactics to be too extreme, which has caused a schism between activist groups in the past
(Pour une Agriculture 2012). Crop destruction is high-risk, as there is a possibility of
139 demonstrators being seen as thugs or vandals, but France has become increasingly receptive to destructive methods of GMO protest.
The demonstrations of French activists have always been considered to be a festive, fun, or lighthearted event, at least to those involved in the protesting (Bonneuil,
Joly, and Marris 2008). For instance, in the destruction of the McDonalds in 1999, the actual event was portrayed as a “festive dismantling,” and the trial that followed the event included a “solidarity festival” with an attendance of around 100,000 (Kuper 2003:26).
By creating a festive atmosphere, activists hope to demonstrate to the public that they do not mean to intimidate with their approach, but rather to encourage politicians and the court to change their opinions regarding GMOs.
Direct action events in France have been very frequent throughout much of the anti-GMO campaign. One of the first crop destruction events is thought to be the attack on GM corn that occurred at a Nérac facility in 1998 (Hayes 2007). The number of attacks built slowly throughout the late 1990s, but really began to increase after 2001.
This led to an estimation that around 17 percent of field trials were destroyed in 2001, 33 percent were destroyed in 2003, and 50 percent were destroyed in 2004 (Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris 2008; Seifert 2013). From 1995 to 2009, activists destroyed approximately 83 crop trials, a feat that contributed to the sizable reduction in GMO field trial use in France
(Seifert 2013). Some examples of direct action activities can be seen in Table 8.
Table 9: Examples of Crop Destruction Activities in France Date Facility Location Destruction
140 1998 Novartis Nérac 3 tons of corn destroyed (listed as first event) 1998 Monsanto Monbequi Soya and maize destroyed 1999 CIRAD (INRA working Montpelier Rice cultures, computers with CIRAD) destroyed 1999 Anne-Marie Chevre’s Saint Georges Rapeseed destroyed experiment (INRA) d’Esperanches 2003 GEVES Guyancourt Corn destroyed 2004 CIRAD Sinnamary Coffee destroyed 2004 Arvalis Dijon Maize destroyed 2009 INRA Colmar Grapevines destroyed
Primary Activist Groups
Of significance in the fight against GMOs is the former spokesperson for the
Confédération Paysanne (CP), José Bové. Bové is a small-scale sheep farmer and producer of Roquefort cheese who gained notoriety after partially dismantling a
McDonald’s in France and protesting restrictions on the global trade of French cheese at the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle (Seifert 2013). In line with the views of the CP, Bové was strongly against globalization in its many forms, but turned that focus toward the protest of GMOs in the late 1990’s. Though he aligns himself with peasant farmers, Bové was actually born into a family of academics, but became interested in the struggle of the peasant farmer after working on a deserted farm in France during the anti-military Larzac struggle (Seifert 2009).
José Bové was heavily influenced by the ideas of Henry David Thoreau and
Mahatma Gandhi, and it was their notions of civil disobedience that informed his direct action techniques in regards to GMOs (Kuper 2003). Through his attention grabbing resistance techniques, Bové gained a celebrity status in France, and was able to bring the issue of GM food to a wider audience. He has been described as “an instantly
141 recognizable figure, with his extravagant moustache and pipe-smoking habit, popping up wherever there is an ecological axe to be ground” (José Bové 2002). Bové has been arrested multiple times for his civil disobedience, and has contributed to the framing of the anti-GMO movement as an anti-globalization movement fighting for the rights of the farmer and the right of the consumer to “good food.” This framing will be discussed in greater depth later in the chapter.
José Bové and his partner, René Riesel, were important actors in the CP for the direct action approach, but their crop destruction techniques were seen as much too radical for many members of the CP. Members such as Guy Le Fur were critical of direct action tactics, and advocated for a more internal approach working with the government to effect change (Heller 2002). This division in tactical approach led to internal disputes within the CP. While the crop destruction activities gained the most attention, the CP was also known to work with the government to create bills relating to GMOs (Doherty and
Hayes 2012b).
In the beginning of CP crop destruction, the protests were directed at multinational corporations such as Novartis and Monsanto. However, this shift focused later in the campaign to include more research facilities. CP efforts started as a movement targeting globalism as a whole, but were revised to include the changing nature of agricultural research. Activists opposed the use of research to further goals of corporations, and saw this vertical integration as the furthering of an Americanized style of agriculture.
The Faucheurs Volontaires (FV) got their start in 2003, 30 years after the beginning of the Larzac movement (Seifert 2013). The name Faucheurs Volontaires
142 means voluntary reapers, and the reaping, pulling, or overall destruction of GM crops has been the main activity of those active in the group. The FV is related to the CP, and has served as a way to redistribute the fines from past crop destruction activities, to take charge of new crop destructions, and to garner more support from the formerly inactive urbanites of France (Seifert 2013).
Similar to the CP, Faucheurs have a commitment to openness of actions and acceptance of punishment, and are required to sign a charter upon joining the group that requires them to engage in crop destruction activities and to consent to any legal repercussions that they may incur (Hayes 2007). While activists are responsible for the consequences of their actions, the FV provides some means of fundraising in order to help pay for legal council and fines (Doherty and Hayes 2012b).
Framing Direct Action in France
Near the beginning of French protest of GMOs, risk-reduction was one of the larger frames that was used. At this time, activists and scientists were working together to establish the real risk that GMOs provided to environment and human health. This was a time when people all across Europe were beginning to question the effectiveness of their regulatory food agencies, and the addition of biotechnology provided an uncertain risk to consumption safety and vegetative gene flow (Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris 2008). The public conception of risk was enhanced by the development of other biotechnological applications such as animal cloning and genetic testing (Bauer and Gaskell 2001). This frame shifted around 1999, when activists began to focus on the more social aspects of genetic modification (Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris 2008).
143 With the involvement of the CP and later FV, the anti-GMO movement in France began to be framed as a movement against the globalist nature of GMOs and in favor of a revitalization of French food culture. Biotechnology is representative of exactly the type of agricultural model that activist groups such as the CP were attempting to eliminate. Of particular concern in the framing of GMOs as a globalized, industrial product were the issues of intellectual property rights and patents, small farmer or peasant rights, and land and biodiversity rights (Doherty and Hayes 2012b). Research institutions were singled out not only for the risk that their field trials posed to the safety of surrounding vegetation, but also for the role that they played in the development of industrial agriculture for private gain (Seifert 2013). By aligning with Bové and other anti- globalization activists, the anti-GMO coalition was also taking a stand against the
“Americanization” of French food and agriculture (see Table 10).
Table 10: Activist Frames, Goals, and Successes in France Direct Action in France Frames Risk of GMOs; Anti-Globalization, Pro-peasant farming; against “la malbouffe” Goals Obtain greater research and safety measures for GMOs; Draw attention to the issue of GMOs; Increase activist base; Change the laws and/or legal precedents relating to GMOs; Stop the development of GMOs in France Successes Increased studies relating to safety of GMOs; Increased media attention; Increased activist membership in groups such as the FV; Creation of new GMO laws; Reduced court sentences for activists; Removal of GMO field trials and/or products from France
Central to Bové’s framing of GMOs was the idea of la malbouffe, in which
GMOs, along with other current agricultural trends in France, were conceived of as “junk food” (Heller 2007). Bové’s use of la malbouffe drew on France’s rich culture of high
144 quality food in order to frame the GMO issue as an attack on French culture. Heller
(2007) described this phenomenon as a “lack of ‘culturalness’ or a GMO’s rupture with artisanal food production” (603).
The change from a risk-oriented frame to one more focused on socioeconomic issues represents the development of a significant rift between activists and pro-GM scientists and politicians regarding the value of genetically modified food. At this time,
France was working to become more of an industrial agriculture superpower, an effort that was supported by the Politique Agricole Commun (Common Agricultural Policy) of the time (Heller 2007). This institutional change led to the provision of subsidies to large- scale farms making use of chemically intensive, export-driven, technologically motivated methods (Heller 2007). In light of the agricultural model proposed by the government and practiced by researchers, GMOs were framed as an improvement to traditional agricultural methods. However, anti-GMO activists continued to see GMOs as a lower quality, unnatural agricultural creation.
Throughout the anti-GMO movement, French activists have been highly effective in communicating their resistance frames to the public. Part of this success has come from the protesters’ active engagement with the media during and following crop destruction events. Aside from maintaining legitimacy, French activists choose to protest out in the open in order to allow members to tell the media what message they are trying to convey with their actions (Seifert 2013). Media presence at crop destruction events ensures that the issue of GMOs will stay relevant in the eyes of the public, and that an alternate perspective on industrial agriculture will be presented to citizens and policy makers.
145 The use of court cases has also been effective in strengthening resistance frames among the anti-GMO community. Because activists facing penalty were forced to convince the court of the validity of their actions on so many different occasions, groups such as the CP and FV created a platform of reasons why crop destruction was a rational response to the presence of GMOs (Doherty and Hayes 2012b). This strategy was successful, as it caused some courts to eventually determine that crop destruction could be warranted based on the “state of urgency” caused by the potential intermingling of
GM and conventional crops (Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris 2008:17).
The initial goal of the movement was to obtain greater research and safety measures for GMO crop trials. This was the goal back when the predominant frame was risk-oriented. As more research was conducted on GMOs, the goals of the movement appeared to shift in order to accommodate more socioeconomic frames. As demonstrated by the use of media, one of the main goals was to keep the issue in the public’s attention.
The second, more obvious goal of the movement has been to stop the use of open-air
GMO field trials and discourage the commercialization of GMOs in France. Through the use of crop destruction, activists hope that GMO developers will decide that the environment in France is too hostile and monetarily inefficient to encourage further development (Hayes 2007). Finally, the movement has used the issue of GMOs as a mode to change the way that the French government, courts, and public deal with food and agriculture issues as a whole. Though the process of crop destruction inherently deals with working outside of the law, its goal is not necessarily to destroy the laws and institutions in place. Rather, the crop destruction that occurred in France was an attempt to draw attention to the issues with the current GMO regulations and force the
146 government to create stricter laws protecting the economic and social well being of its citizens (Doherty and Hayes 2012b).
France has had a lot of success with keeping the GMO debate present in the media. The amount of participants in groups such as the CP and FV has grown substantially. Seifert (2013) stated that through the practices employed by the anti-GMO coalition, “activists dominated the public debate over a period of ten years, thus significantly contributing to the fundamental reform of France’s biotechnology policy”
(215). A second method of determining success in this movement would be to examine the number of field trials occurring in France and determine if they have decreased through time. Lastly, if the true goal of the movement is to change the institutional treatment of GMOs, attention should be paid to how court treatment of activists has changed and how laws regarding field trials have evolved. In general, activists have received faster court sentencing and more legal justification for their actions (Hayes
2007).
French Opinion of Science and Risk
The French public has been relatively positive regarding the potential of science and technology. They have shown above average support for technology such as nuclear power, computer technology, telecommunications, and even some biotechnology (Bauer and Gaskell 2001). Support for technological answers to agriculture has been mixed, as
French citizens have balanced the competing desires to maintain the French culture of food production while establishing the role of France as a competitor in a larger agricultural market.
147 For a time period during the active protest in France, scientists and activists were on the same side of the argument. During this time, the anti-GMO argument was still being framed in terms of the potential risk that GMOs could have to health and the environment. Activists aimed to lessen this risk by increasing the amount of research completed on GMO safety. There were many scientists at this point who agreed with the need for more research, and therefore began to create an alliance with protestors based on their similar goals. This alliance began to crumble as activists turned away from the risk- reduction frame and began to destroy more GM experiments on academic institutions
(Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris 2008).
Many scientists, including those formerly in alliance with activists, were confused by the continuation of direct action after increased research was completed on the safety of the technology, with some seeing the crop destruction as a personal attack on their own research. This exasperation led to the creation of a petition asking activists to stop practicing crop trashing. Lamenting on the effectiveness of the activists’ approach, 1400 researchers ended up signing the petition (Doherty and Hayes 2012b). In the end, the plea had little effect on activists, to whom the GM issue was never really about the scientific legitimacy of GMOs. One CP leader stated regarding the issue, “we could carry on debating purely scientific questions for who you, researchers, are the only ones to really have the keys…What is important to us…is the underlying justification for these experiments” (Bonneuil, Joly, and Marris 2008:18). Essentially, the shift to a socioeconomic frame represented a break from scientifically informed evaluations of
GMOs to evaluations based on farmers’ critiques (Heller 2002).
148 Near the beginning of the resistance against GMOs, the discourse of risk was a salient part of the anti-GMO campaign. Although the frame later changed to more socioeconomic issues, it is clear that the idea of risk is still present. Early efforts focused on the risk of GMOs to biodiversity and human health, thereby depicting seeds and their genes as having the power to provide an environment of risk. In this situation, even though Monsanto or the research institutions are the ones making the decision to grow
GMOs, the GM material is actually the actor that is inducing risk. After the change of frame, the focus of the risk was placed on the impact that changes could make to French agriculture, food, culture, and society. In the latter framing, the actors responsible for producing risk became the seed companies such as Monsanto, the research facilities, the politicians, and the consumers. So while many would say that the change of framing led to a post-risk movement, the idea of risk remained, but the things being risked and the actors causing risk had changed.
Protest and a Cultural Understanding of Food Production in France
Anti-GMO crop destruction is a practice that is firmly rooted in a deep history of
French protest in France. The Faucheurs Volontaires were especially influenced by previous French protests and the right to protest given to the French by the Revolutionary constitution of 1793 (Doherty and Hayes 2012b). As mentioned briefly, Bové and others involved in the current movement drew on the experiences that the French had during the previous Larzac struggle. The Larzac movement was caused by the intended expansion of military land into farmland in France (Liu 2011). This was seen as internal colonialism, and was opposed by many peasant farmers, eventually leading to the creation of the
149 group Paysans-Travailleurs, which engaged in protest and direct action (Liu 2011). The
Larzac struggle is seen as an example of a successful direct action campaign in France.
The anti-GMO movement in France has, for many years, been a movement against globalization. Though globalization is not inherently American, there have been many times throughout the movement when things have been presented as an alternative to an American way of doing things. One interesting case of this relates to José Bové and his signature mustache. Bové has been known to sport an Asterix mustache, which is a reference to a French comic in which the hero, Asterix, and his village fight off a much larger Roman invading force (Riding 1996). Asterix is seen as a hero in France, much like Bové, and the use his mustache allows the activists to draw a comparison to the
French and the invading cultural outsiders such as America. It is interesting to note that in some McDonald’s in France, Asterix has been used as an icon in replacement of Ronald
McDonald, possibly as a way to create a distinction between McDonald’s and America
(Bedoya 2003).
American food is also thought of as a key example of a society that promotes standardization, industrialization, and price above food culture and value. Monsanto’s
GM seed technology is seen as an extension of these beliefs. Although the movement was often framed in opposition to American behavior, Bové did make an effort to include what would be the equivalent of peasant farmers in America in his movement. For instance, when in Seattle for the WTO meeting, he met with Bill Christinson of the
National Coalition of Family Farmers (America) in addition to other country’s farmer leaders, and made an effort to conceptualize the movement as being against “international capital” instead of America (Heller 2002).
150 Food and nature are important aspects of French culture. Similar to the way that nature is conceived in Britain, nature in France refers to the idea of the countryside, and is inherently related to French agriculture (Heller 2007). This is very different from the perception in the United States, where nature is thought of more as wilderness untouched by human actions. In France, the word nature evokes the concept of “social rural life”
(Heller 2002:18). It combines the benefits naturally provided by the land with a history of stewardship, cultivation, and appreciation of traditional agricultural methods.
Biotechnology was being developed in France at the same time as other widespread changes were being implemented, such as the promotion of industrial agriculture, the shift from local markets to larger supermarkets, and the introduction of fast food restaurants into France (Heller 2007). Bové and the anti-GMO movement helped to draw attention to the impact that these pervasive changes were having on the character of French food. At the heart of the French battle against la malbouffe is the promotion of a concept that that is fundamental to the essence of French food culture: le terroir.
Terroir represents an important synthesis of geographical origin and cultural diffusion (Terroir 2011). It has been described as a combination of “soil, weather, region and notions of authenticity, of genuineness and particularity—of roots, and home—in contrast to globalized products designed to taste the same everywhere” (Erlanger 2013).
Terroir is fundamental to French food, but this importance has been diminishing as consumers begin to choose convenience or price over quality. For instance, the amount of cheese shops in France has dropped by 85 percent over the past 30 years (Erlanger 2013).
Comparisons to Other Countries
151 Many other countries within the European Union have also made use of direct action techniques in their opposition of GMOs. The three countries of note that will be discussed in comparison to France are the UK, Germany, and Spain. All three countries have exhibited crop destruction techniques, but they have varied as far as the openness of their actions, the frequency with which they employed direct action, and the success that crop destruction was able to achieve in their anti-GMO movement. It is interesting to compare multiple cases within the EU because it demonstrates that even though much of the treatment of GMOs in the EU is the same, differing local contexts can lead to varying levels of success.
Direct Action techniques were widespread throughout the EU, as well as in countries occupying other regions of the globe. A few examples of these actions are provided in Figure 14. In addition, the details of these specific examples of crop destruction are provided in Table 11.
152 Figure 14: Examples of Direct Action from Case Studies and Comparison Cases
Source: http://www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/12676-india-farmers- destroy-duponts-gm-rice-trials; Seifert, F. (2013). Transnational Diffusion of a High-Cost Protest Method: Open field destructions in France, Germany and Spain. Interface 5(2), 213-239; Doherty, B., & Hayes, G. (2012b). Tactics, Traditions and Opportunities: British and French crop-trashing actions in comparative perspective. European Journal of Political Research, 51(4), 540-562.
153 Table 11: Examples of Crop Destruction in Other Countries Country Date Activist Crop Damage Group UK 1998 Unknown GM sugar beet Nocturnal destruction of field in Norfolk and two week occupation UK 1999 Greenpeace GM maize Crop trash at Lyng in Norfolk
UK 1999 GenetiX multiple Attack of nine sites (reference to Ambridge Against Genetics soap opera) Germany 2002 Unknown GM Rapeseed Test fields destroyed in Dahnsdorf Germany 2003 Unknown GM Potatoes Field trial of the Department of Plant Breeding of the Technische Universität München destroyed
Germany 2005 (many Gendreck GM corn Attempted similar attempts weg! destruction; many in years activists arrested following) Germany 2008 Gendreck GM corn Night-time weg! destruction of maize field Spain 1999 Transgenics GM wheat Destruction at Fora!; IRTA of GM Assemblea wheat with Pagesa scythes and reaping hooks Spain 1999 Assemblea GM wheat Destruction of Pagesa Syngenta field trial Source: See Above (Figure 14)
154 UK
Of the three countries, the UK experience with crop destruction has been the most similar to France’s, and has also included the largest amount of crop destruction activities. Crop destruction began in 1997 in the UK, around the same time as it began in
France (Doherty and Hayes 2012b). Direct action was just one of many tactics employed in the UK resistance movement, and initially started with very small-scale efforts, known as pixieing (Doherty and Hayes 2012b). In the early stages of resistance, crop destruction was implemented mainly by only the most extreme activists, and gained almost no public attention (Doherty and Hayes 2012b).
In the French crop destruction, an intense emphasis was placed on the openness of direct action activities. In the UK, crop destruction activities were divided between covert, nocturnal, anonymous actions and open, accountable actions. Covert actions, used by groups such as Earth First!, had the goal of destroying as much property as possible while maintaining anonymity (Doherty and Hayes 2012b). Open field destruction was implemented by the group GenetiX Snowball, and shared a more similar goal to France of drawing public attention from the direct action. The division between those willing to accept punishment for direct action and those not willing to was one reason why the anti-
GMO movement in the UK had so many different activist group participants.
One feature of the UK direct action effort that varied from other similar movements was the way that activists used humor. The activists in the UK were very conscious of the risk that they faced of losing the public if it decided that crop destruction was too extreme of a method. Protesters wanted to maintain the image that the anti-GMO movement was relevant to a wider audience, so they promoted the destruction as a
155 nonthreatening, humorous action (Doherty and Hayes 2012b). This sense of fun was supported through the use of costumes and of references to popular culture.
The movement in the UK also differed from its counterparts in other nations due to its non-hierarchical structure. Described as “anarchist individualism,” the UK-based groups followed a tradition of protest that discouraged ranking and organization within the movement (Doherty and Hayes 2012b:555). This is one of the reasons that the activist groups in the UK do not make use of a spokesperson or leader such as Bové. Groups such as GenetiX Snowball encouraged as many people as possible to get involved in the crop destruction, and often made use of citizens who were not necessarily members of an activist group.
In many ways, the crop destruction in the UK was as successful, or even more successful, than the destruction in France. In 2004, use of direct action caused Bayer to stop its attempts to grow GMOs in the UK (Doherty and Hayes 2012b). In 2007, continued crop destruction caused the abandonment of new crop trial research center efforts (Doherty and Hayes 2012b). Activists in the UK faced fewer court consequences for their actions, which demonstrates the receptiveness of courts to the activists’ argument. Some groups like GenetiX Snowball, however, found less success because they were not able to achieve the activist numbers or court and media attention that they intended.
In general, the crop destruction efforts in France and the UK shared many similarities and had comparable amounts of success. Both France and the UK have similarly strong, exclusionary governments that are interested in the prospects of biotechnology, but receptive to the fears of activists. The UK was also going through a
156 push for industrial agriculture at the time of GMO introduction, but did not have a farmers’ union opposing the efforts of biotechnology that mirrored the CP in France.
Though there was strong institutional support for GMOs, the UK also had a strong public opposition of the technology, with one ICM poll showing that 55 percent of the public approved of crop destruction efforts (Doherty, Plows, and Wall 2003).
Though the anti-GMO movement in the UK does not have any specific ties to agricultural groups, it does represent an effort to deal with environmental issues in a more direct, intense way. In the UK, there is a desire to protect the notion of the English countryside, which is similar to in France. The UK provides one example where an environmental framing seems to have been enough to encourage public support.
Germany
Germany made use of direct action many times throughout its anti-GMO movement. Its use of crop destruction was influenced by France, but included a lot more covert action, much like in the UK (Seifert 2013). Germany’s movement was unique in its usage of field occupations, in which activists would take over fields for extended amounts of time (Seifert 2013). These occupations were often accompanied by nighttime covert destruction of GMOs. Upwards of 100 covert crop destruction events took place over Germany’s resistance, with most of the action completed by anonymous activists
(Seifert 2013). One group, Gendreck weg!, made use of open crop destruction methods, and completed at least one crop destruction event a year until the group broke up in 2012
(Seifert 2013).
For many reasons, the direct action campaign in Germany was not able to achieve as much success as the movement in France. One reason for this might be that direct
157 action was just not as important a tactic for Germany as it was for France. In Germany, crop destruction began to be implemented at a pretty late date, signifying either that other resistance tactics were being used or that activists were making use of institutional support for their cause. In fact, Germany has had relatively strong GMO regulations for a long time that have been generally receptive to activist concerns. Seifert (2013) proposed that by the time Germany was starting to use crop destruction, it was already pretty close to accomplishing its GMO goals.
In addition to its late start, crop destruction was simply not able to garner as much support in Germany as it gained in France. As stated previously, there was no agricultural union supporting the anti-GMO movement in Germany, and in addition, there was no political party that was willing to back the efforts of the activists (Seifert 2013). The
German movement was also unable to make use of the court systems in the same way as the French. Many activists were not tried, and when they were, activists were not able to turn the case into a trial of GMO usefulness. Finally, activists were unable to obtain a lot of citizen support, and could never establish a firm connection between GMOs and globalization, which has been one of the keys of success for the French movement.
The last explanation for Germany’s relative lack of success with crop destruction is its lack of connection to agriculture. In the French movement, as well as other successful crop trashing movements, the tie to peasant agriculture was found to be instrumental to the proliferation of the movement. In France, Bové was the ultimate representation of the French farmer, and as a producer of Roquefort, was accepted as an expert on the topic. In Germany, the closest connection to food production came from
Michael Grolm, a beekeeper who spent time in prison for his crop destruction (Seifert
158 2013). The use of Grolm was ultimately not enough to establish the anti-GMO movement as a farmer movement.
Spain
Spain, the final case from the EU, is the most different from the others due to its high level of GM crop growth. Spain was also influenced by the direct action efforts of
France, but exhibited the fewest instances of crop destruction of the countries listed.
Some direct action was used in Spain, but generally Spanish activists made better use of information production and demonstrations. Much like in France, Germany, and Britain,
Spanish activists hoped to make use of the courts as a way to draw attention to the issue of GMOs. This method was found to be highly inappropriate in Spain, where activists faced extremely harsh punishments for crop destruction (Seifert 2013).
The crop destruction efforts in Spain were not able to significantly reduce the amount of field trials in the country, and really found no significant level of success
(Seifert 2013). This was due to four main reasons. First, Spain has been one of the few countries in the EU that has experienced high levels of GMO growth, with a production level greater than 50,000 hectares as of 2012 (James 2012). The regulation in Spain has reflected this development. Second, Spanish courts were found to be very unreceptive to activist arguments, and therefore made a strategy based on the transformation of laws through activist trials to be ineffective. The third issue came from the lack of public interest in GMOs. Similar to Germany, Spain was unable to form a relationship between
GMOs and globalization. In addition, Spain has not had a history of controversy in regards to food or technology. Because GMOs were promoted before there was widespread public debate over their merits, the Spanish public was not apt to question the
159 benefit of the technology. The final barrier to the Spanish movement was its lack of ties to rural agriculture, much like the case in Germany. All of these factors, plus the high level of success the GMOs have experienced in Spain, led to the eventual failure of crop destruction as a resistance technique.
Conclusion
The French anti-GMO campaign has been very successful, and has inspired a number of replications in other countries. It is generally seen as one of the main centers of diffusion for crop destruction techniques, which is why it was chosen as the primary case study in this thesis. Britain’s direct action campaign occurred contemporaneously with France’s, but did not exhibit the same level of public attention, connection to farmers, or commitment to transparency as the French movement. Other countries in the
EU attempted direct action as well, but had lesser amounts of success.
From the French case study, four factors can be determined that contribute to the success of direct action as a protest tactic. The first factor is the presence of a charismatic leader. José Bové has incredibly influential to the French movement, and was able to gain international attention and public support for his actions. In the movement in the UK, there was no significant leader, but this was due to their preference for a non-hierarchical activist structure. Many leaders have stated that they do not wish do speak on behalf of every activist, but having a spokesperson can be a helpful way to communicate the message that the activists want to tell to the public.
Tied into the idea of a charismatic leader is the second factor leading to success: the ability to create a captivated audience. In France, the public was generally very supportive of the ideas and actions of the protestors, and was able to be convinced of the
160 protest logic that GMOs represented globalization and Americanization of French food.
This anti-globalization was well understood and accepted in India too. In Haiti, there is a strong culture of internal solutions to agriculture problems, so farmers readily agreed with the anti-donation platform provided by the activists. In the UK, the public was harder to convince, so activists were forced to resort to protest methods that combined crop destruction with costuming or showmanship. In many other European countries, there was very little public support and understanding of the issue, contributing to the ultimate problems with employing direct action.
The third factor contributing to a successful direct action campaign is a connection to a rural, peasant, or small-scale agricultural base. Even though Bové was not actually a peasant farmer by birth, he did become the spokesperson for the very involved peasant farmer group, Confédération Paysanne. This aspect has been described in depth in Chapter 3.
The final factor leading to success is the openness of the government or the court to the activist resistance logic. This is kind of counterintuitive, as many countries resort to direct action as a last effort against strong, centralized governments, but it appears as though countries such as France and India have been able to successfully make use of their governments and court systems to enact change. In a truly open form of crop destruction, the ultimate goal is to get caught and be tried in court. This is the goal because it allows the activist to draw attention to their issues with the technology and hopefully change the way the court treats GMOs in the future. In countries such as Spain, where the court system was not responsive to these arguments, and often doled out harsh
161 punishment for direct action, there is little incentive to engage in open direct action, and the tactic is soon abandoned.
These factors will not always determine the success of a direct action campaign, but will provide some of the characteristics that should encourage use of crop destruction in the anti-GMO movement. Even though activists employing direct action tactics often frame the issue in terms of globalization or biodiversity risk, it is clear that there is an underlying fear that GMOs will damage the culture of food that is an essential part of their national identity. Comparing this to a country such as the United States, where there is little specific food culture and a long history of agricultural industrialization and experimentation, the presence of GMOs is not felt as an attack on the culture of food production in the US, and therefore is not expected to trigger as dramatic of a response.
Also in the US, there not a real connection to peasant farming as large-scale agriculture is often promoted, there is little government or court support for activists due to the government’s promotion of biotechnology, and there is little public interest in the issue.
This could be why direct action has not really occurred in the United States anti-GMO movement to any great level.
162 Chapter 7: Conclusion
When I began this study, I was intrigued by the lack of general interest that I was seeing expressed in the American anti-GMO movement. In comparison to the European
Union, where citizens seemed to actively engage in the GMO issue, the movement in the
United States did not appear to be able to gain any real traction with farmer or consumer groups. As I developed my project, I spoke with people about the issue of GMOs, and began to notice that many people were not even aware of what the term meant, and those who had heard of GMOs often saw the anti-GMO movement as a fringe movement that did not really concern them. This led to my initial question of interest: why is it that
America, a country that supports a democratic process and a vast array of consumer options, has been thus far unable to have a successful anti-GMO movement?
Due to the global nature of the movement, I decided that the best way to compare success of a national campaign would be to compare campaigns in other countries.
Initially, I thought that success of a movement could be represented by some quantitative value that signified the extent to which a country was able to keep GMOs out of their agricultural market. What I came to realize was that attempting to create a success value does not really make sense if the goal of the movement is not to get rid of GMOs.
Because of the global scope of the anti-GMO movement, each region is going to vary as far as what aspects of GMOs it sees as a risk, and therefore how much of a presence it is going to allow in the country.
Based on my analysis of anti-GMO activism, I have five main conclusions that frame my overall argument. The first conclusion is that countries that employ the same tactic will generally exhibit similar frames, goals, and cultural climates. Second, the
163 frames used by activists in the anti-GMO movement will make use of narratives of acceptable risk. Third, the use of a peasant, indigenous, or small-scale agricultural frame has been very successful in the anti-GMO movement. Fourth, success of a movement should be understood in context-specific terms. Fifth, once these relationships are determined, this model can provide insight into what methods will be the most successful
(socially supported or understood) for other food movements in the future.
The first conclusion is demonstrated by the movement experiences outlined in each tactic chapter. By comparing multiple cases in which the same resistance tactic was used, I was able to show that for the most part, countries employing similar tactics will share certain characteristics. For instance, in the moratorium chapter, the Latin American countries were all centers of biodiversity with important peasant or indigenous classes and frames depicting the contamination risk of GMOs. The use of similar tactics is a natural development because the strategies utilized are appropriate for the context in which they developed. In other words, the tactic matches the frame because activists are conforming to a confluence of economic, political and cultural factors that exist in each country. In some cases, countries with dissimilar contexts have tried to use the same tactic. When Spain attempted to follow France’s direct action techniques even though it had significantly different local conditions, it found that direct action was not an appropriate method of resistance. Spain’s lack of a peasant agriculture base and its judicial opposition to the protest narrative caused it to be less able to use the direct action tactic.
In addition to the sharing of tactics due to the existence of comparable local environments, tactics are also shared due to the diffusion of a method from one country to
164 another. Seifert (2013) stated, “Diffusion within and between movements is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Protest movements do not entirely reinvent themselves with every new conflict; rather they are influenced by other movements” (213). As can be seen in the
Latin American case, Mexico was the first location to use the image of maize as the center of biodiversity as a way to inspire a moratorium. This narrative diffused outward and influenced a lot of the other Latin American countries. The selection of tactics and frames is interesting because, even though there has been a lot of involvement from international NGOs in the movements, the development of the techniques and frames have been equally progressed by both the North and the South. The Southern depiction of the anti-GMO movement has therefore been an important factor in the widespread usage of an anti-globalization frame, which has an underlying idea of challenging the dominant authority on GMOs.
The second conclusion that has been found is that in every anti-GMO movement was studied, a narrative of risk was used to explain the controversy. This narrative of risk goes back to Beck’s idea of “risk society,” in which people are forced to spend greater amounts of time negotiating risk in the face of a modernization of society. Technological advancements such as GMOs are often seen as primary drivers of change and producers of potential risk. The anti-GMO narratives examined in this paper concerned risk as far as what was being risked, what was an acceptable level of risk, and who or what was providing the risk. For instance, in the Mexican anti-GMO movement, maize biodiversity was being risked by the introduction of GMOs. This risk was being provided by the outside force of another country, as well as by the actual genetic material itself.
Ultimately, the Mexican activists determined that the risk provided to biodiversity was
165 higher than what they considered to be an acceptable level of risk, and they initiated a ban on GMOs. The narrative of risk is a useful tool for anti-GMO movements because it allows activists to frames the issue in terms of the costs and benefits of introducing the technology into the country.
One interesting aspect of the conception of risk is the way that anti-GMO activists are often portrayed as being anti-science, a portrayal that has been shown to come with a set of negative connotations. This portrayal misunderstands the way in which activists are conceiving risk. Rather than casting aside scientifically driven notions as a whole, anti-
GMO activists are actually refusing to promote science or health as the only indicator of
GMO acceptability. If activists were to engage with a science-driven frame, they may gain more sympathy or understanding from an international crowd; however, it would be more beneficial to change peoples’ minds about the acceptability of cultural, political, and ethical evaluations in the GMO debate. Because the science proving that GMOs are unhealthy is inconclusive, activists have to convince the international powers that there is a value in taking into consideration non-scientific factors if they want to obtain success.
The third conclusion deals with the importance of the pro-peasantry, pro- indigenous, or pro-small-scale farmer frame within anti-GMO movements. This conclusion was largely addressed in Chapter 3, and relates to the importance of food sovereignty in many of these countries. Whether this frame will be viable for a movement will depend upon the agricultural characteristics and history that exist in a country. For instance, in America, there is a large amount of agriculture, but this agriculture is largely grown by a few large-scale farmers. It is also heavily reliant on new, technological techniques and is very far-removed from most consumers. Many American consumers
166 are also unused to thinking in terms of food sovereignty. In contrast, countries that have a large population of small-scale farmers and a history of food sovereignty or food security issues will probably be better equipped to implement this frame effectively.
The fourth conclusion that was drawn from this research is that there is no single way to determine success of a movement. Instead of comparing all movements according to one set of standards, it is more beneficial to look at the context of each country in order to determine success. Figure 15 demonstrates how success of a movement was determined in my research. For each case study, I began by looking at the frames employed by each national movement, and the goals that developed both explicitly and implicitly from the stated frames. This included an interpretation of what the activists stated that they were trying to achieve, as well as which aspects of the technology the activists were going after. Based on the goals of each specific tactic, I looked at whether an activist group was successful.
In the figure below, I provide a very general framework for how this success method can be applied to each of the three case studies. This method leaves out a lot of the nuances of the movement in each country, but provides some understanding of whether activist groups are able to achieve their resistance goals. One thing that stands out from Figure 15 is that, according to my methodology, the US has not yet achieved success, while both Mexico and France have had considerable levels of success.
167 Figure 15: Schema of Frames, Goals, and Success for Each Case Study
When discussing the success of movements, I discuss them in terms of the three levels of resistance explained previously in this paper. These levels are not seen as a progression, but rather as a continuum of the intensity of GMO rejection goals. As a reminder, level 1 resistance is the least intense, with activists not hoping to get rid of
GMOs, but to create an environment where they have the ability to decide if they want to purchase GM products or not. Level 2 resistance has medium intensity, with activists hoping to stop the introduction of GMOs for a period of time so that they can make an informed decision about whether they should be allowed in the country or not. Level 3 resistance is the most intense, with activists pushing for a removal of most (or all) of the
GMOs in the country. Again, activists do not progress through the levels as though they were stages, but may instead make use of multiple levels of resistance simultaneously.
The EU is a good example of a region that has employed all three levels of resistance.
In the United States, activists have mostly employed the labeling tactic, and, as was demonstrated in the labeling chapter, this method has had only moderate success up until now, but is really starting to be on the precipice of either gaining momentum or
168 failing as a technique. This tactic demonstrates the underlying frame in the United States as a right to information. Because Americans are concerned with the transparency of the market and the ability to choose whether to purchase GM products, success in the movement would not be to completely remove GMOs from the country. The actual goal would be to allow mandatory labeling so then consumers could decide in the stores whether they want to purchase GM products or not. Labeling is therefore an example of
Level 1 resistance. This decision might have the added benefit of increasing the GMO- free products or decreasing GM products, but this is not the ultimate goal of the tactic.
Countries that use a temporary moratorium, on the other hand, hope to create a ban so that they can leave time to reevaluate the situation. A lot of times there are outside forces making these countries think that they need to decide whether to let GMOs in or not, and the countries making this decision often have the most to lose from letting
GMOs into the country if it is found that the technology is problematic in the future.
Here, success would involve the creation of a moratorium, but this moratorium does not have to be permanent. If the country decides that GMOs are actually safe or if they decide that they want to support GMO production in the future, then it is okay that the moratorium is only temporary. This does not take away from the success of this tactic. A temporary moratorium would therefore be an example of Level 2 resistance, but has the potential to transform into Level 3 if activists decide that a permanent ban is more appropriate.
Finally, direct action is often used when there is a strict anti-GMO or anti-
Monsanto frame with activists not wanting GMOs now, in the future, or in any capacity.
Direct action is used as a way to stop the problem in the short run with the hopes of
169 stopping it long term through either the redevelopment of the policy or through the company’s deciding that they are not going to develop GMOs in that country. In terms of using multiple levels of resistance, a country such as France might use direct action in combination with labeling so that it can stop GMO growth through direct action, and (as a back up) stop people from purchasing them in the marketplace with labeling. In these cases, success is defined by the context of each movement, and not in terms of one overall value.
By looking at local anti-GMO movements, one can see what works—o r does not work—for certain countries. This illustrates which tactics are appropriate in each region, which is a determination looking at which tactics are socially supported or understood, as well as which have been able to obtain success. While it is helpful to look at the anti-
GMO experience to better understand the movement as a whole, it is also useful to apply this knowledge to predictions for other food movements. The anti-GMO movement makes use of a wide variety of frames, so it has the potential to be used for many other food movements such as the organic, local or slow food movement. All of these food movements deal with social, ethical, academic, or socioeconomic considerations in consumer-based decision making. This evaluation of success can also be used to predict the success of an anti-GMO movement in a specific country.
Evaluating the US Anti-GMO Movement
The most interesting case for a forward looking evaluation is the United State’s anti-GMO movement, which is still in its infancy, and go back to my initial question of why it does not seem to be gaining momentum, and what this means about that movement and other American food movements. The US has a lot of food movements,
170 but they are all kind of fringe movements that do not really capture the attention of a larger American audience. This is due to four characteristics that make America distinct from other nations.
The first issue is the high level of trust that Americans have in the regulatory authority in place. In Europe, citizens lost a lot of confidence in their regulatory body after the bovine spongiform encephalopathy scandal. In Latin America, a lot of confidence was lost after the Mexican GMO contamination scandal. The US had its own triggering events, most notably the Starlink scandal, but this did not seem to have as great an effect on the public conception of GMOs, which demonstrates an underlying trust or apathy that American citizens have in the decisions of their regulatory authorities. The organizations that regulate GMOs in America are clear, but what many Americans are unaware of, is that GMOs are regulated similarly to other foods if they are seen to be substantially equivalent, which they often are.
The second characteristic that leads to a lack of food movement development in
America is the American food culture. In the direct action chapter, it was demonstrated how ideas of French production of high quality goods such as cheese and wine was really important to French culture. In Latin America, a center of biodiversity, it was shown how maize especially was so important not only for eating, but for cultural and traditional practices. It is a symbol of their culture, same as the potato in Peru. There is not really this same tradition in the United States, where instead of a specific food culture, there is a tradition of convenience, low price, and a melting of many food cultures into one.
Because of this, the US is going to have different results with a food-inspired movement.
171 The third characteristic that is common in all other movements is that there is some outside force that is seen as trying to change the country’s lifestyle. If you think about genes as an outside force, that still applies to America. However, there is not that anti-globalization, anti-corporation frame that occurs in the other movements. It may exist on the fringes, but has been unable to be mobilized on a mass level. This is mainly because Monsanto is an American country, and American agriculture has a tradition of accepting agricultural technology, so in a way, GMO companies are proposing American notions to Americans. The logic behind a technological solution to agriculture a lot easier to accept in America than it is in the EU, where they favor the precautionary principle, or in other countries, where they have had experiences with the Green Revolution or structural adjustment programs where outside help did not really turn out in their favor.
That is going to have a big impact.
The fourth characteristic that is significant to the American movement is that it does not have a passionate peasant, indigenous, or traditional base to turn to. In fact, in
America, the anti-GMO movement, and really many food movements, are often portrayed as being significant only to the upper class of society. This provides a completely opposite frame to many other countries, where it is the lower classes that are calling for the movement. In the US, there is not a conception that GMOs threaten the traditional lifeways or the food sovereignty or security of the country.
In looking at those variables and trying to see what can happen for the movement in the future (or for other movements), I would argue that the anti-GMO movement will ultimately not be able to sway the greater public in the US. They may further their goals somewhat with labeling, especially if the eastern portion of the country gets its state
172 quota, but America will not witness the crop destruction or banning that has been seen in other countries. For one thing, this has to do with the fact that there just might not be a desire for the movement to gain success in the US. One of the main things that have been shown to be significant to a movement is being able to sell the activist frame to non- active citizens. If they do not buy it, then the movement is not going to gain momentum.
This goes back to the direct action experience. In Germany and Spain, people did not really understand the direct action frame that was being promoted by activists, so they did not buy direct action as a good tactic for resistance. In the US, labeling and protest are likely to be the only tactics that will be deemed acceptable by the public. With labeling, people have got to start buying that it is necessary to label GMOs. America has created nutrition labels in the past, and now they are having more and more organic labels, so it is possible to develop a labeling system, but it will take a lot of convincing of the public. In addition, if activists want to work at the issue through the convincing of politicians and juries that GMOs are an issue, it is the same problem. Activists have to turn the discourse into a trial of GMOs, which I think they would have trouble doing. This could be helped with frame brokerage or through the provision of a charismatic leader such as José Bové, but it would be hard to imagine what type of frame or leader would engage a public that does not show an active interest in ethical food consumption. In order to achieve greater success, America would require a radical shift in the approach of the American public to ethical food consumption. This type of movement has been developing, but it remains largely elitist and out of touch with most Americans.
While each country has a different local context, by looking at the factors that have led to success of anti-GMO movements in the past, we can gain insight into what
173 might work for a country in the future. A lot of this comes down to frame brokerage. It is essential to a campaign to determine what its platform is, and how they can translate it into a message that the public will be able to engage with. Diffusion of techniques from one movement to another can be helpful, but will not always work well in every situation.
It is important that activists look at their country’s history of protest to determine what tactics have been accepted by the public in the past. In order to obtain success, a movement must either challenge the acceptance of the status quo through the development of an argument that is less trusting of science and regulation, or develop a narrative that calls upon important aspects of national, cultural, or local identity.
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193 Appendix A: Coding and Development of Main Themes
194 Appendix B: GMO Growth Patterns for Each Case Study
Source: Clive James, 2012, ISAAA
195 Appendix C: Development of Specific GMO Traits and Crops
*Data shown as percentage of total GMOs.
Source: Clive James, 2012, ISAAA
196 Appendix D: Overview of Tactics and Locations Included in this Research
Tactic Main Comparison Countries/ Details of Tactic Country Regions
Labeling USA EU Attempt to create mandatory labeling through initiatives, propositions, laws, etc.
Banning Mexico Colombia, Peru, Costa Creation of national Rica or local bans; Can be permanent or temporary; Can ban production, *Zambia was examined but importation, all not included in chapter GMOs
Direct Action France UK, Germany, Spain Burning, pulling up, destroying GMOs in *India and Haiti were the field; Can target examined but not included in fields used for chapter research or commercialization
Small-Scale Ag/ --- Mexico, France, Colombia, Framing of issue as Food Sovereignty Peru, Costa Rica, India, pro-peasant, pro- Framing Haiti indigenous, or pro- small-scale farmer; Also frame issue in terms of cultural, political, or environmental food sovereignty
*For many of these countries, activists engaged in multiple resistance tactics. This table is meant to show resistance as it was considered in this paper.
197