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Bees, Beekeepers, and Bureaucrats: Parasitism and the Politics of Transgenic Life

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Bees, Beekeepers, and Bureaucrats: Parasitism and the Politics of Transgenic Life EnvironmentandPlanningD:SocietyandSpaceadvance online publication doi:10.1068/d0510 Bees, beekeepers, and bureaucrats: parasitism and the politics of transgenic life Javier Lezaun Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, Park End Street, Oxford OX1 1HP, England; e-mail: [email protected] Received 5 January 2010; in revised form 26 September 2010; published online 3 June 2011 Abstract. Over the last decade the flying patterns and foraging behavior of bees have become a matter of public policy in the European Union. Determined to establish a system where transgenic crops can `coexist' with conventional and organic farming, the EU has begun to erect a system of demarcations and separations designed to minimize the extent of `gene flow' from genetically modified plants. As the European landscape is regimented through the introduction of isolation distances and buffer zones, bees and other pollinating insects have become vectors of `genetic pollution', disrupting the project of cohabitation and purification devised by European authorities. Drawing on the work of Michel Serres on parasitism, this paper traces the emergence of bees as an object of regulatory scrutiny and as an interruptor of the `coexistence' project. Along with bees, however, another uninvited guest arrived unexpectedly on the scene: the beekeeper, who came to see his traditional relationship to bees, crops, and consumers at risk. The figure of the parasite connects the two essential dynamics described in this paper: an escalation of research and the intensification of political attributes. ``The founding of the naked, empty field, virgin once more, is the oldest work of the human world.'' Michel Serres (2007 The Parasite) At the turn of this century bees became a preoccupation of European bureaucrats. As the European Union (EU) began to assemble a system of rules to ensure the peaceful `coexistence' of genetically modified crops with conventional and organic agriculture, officials came to worry about the role that pollinating insects, especially honeybees, could play in the dissemination of genes from transgenic plants. If, as the EU proclaimed in 2003, Europe is to become a territory where different forms of farming are to live side by side in peaceful juxtaposition, pollinators need to be considered as potential vectors of `genetic pollution': they can transfer genes across the isolation distances and buffer zones established around transgenic crops, fertilize conventional plants with pollen from genetically modified (GM) organisms, and thus mix and comingle forms of life that the EU has decided to keep separate and distinct. With the emergence of `gene flow' as a scientific and political issue for the EU, the flying patterns and foraging behavior of bees suddenly became a matter of public policy. The disruption that bees introduce into the system of separations and exclusions currently being erected across the EU has subtly altered the politics of transgenic life in Europe. Among other things, it has drawn into the fray yet another intruder, the beekeeper. As bureaucrats bring into governmental focus the relationship between plants and their pollinators, and consider possible ways of managing `insect-mediated gene flow', beekeepers, especially those with a professional stake in the husbandry of bee colonies, have emerged as a vocal stakeholderöan uninvited guest at the scientific and political tables where the future of European `coexistence' is being discussed. This paper is a tale of multiple intrusions. Or, to use Michel Serres's (2007) fable, of interconnected acts of parasitism. The logic of the parasite, Serres argued, is the 2 J Lezaun logic of the interrupteröthe ``excluded third'', ``uninvited guest'', or ``unavoidable animal'' that intercepts and confuses relations. The story of bees, beekeepers, and bureaucrats that follows is first and foremost a story of parasitism, even if it appears, in the official literature at least, in the guise of a tale about coexistence, purity, and biopolitical symbiosis. The account begins with the proclamation of `coexistence' as a technopolitical project for the domestication of transgenic organisms in Europe. There is in this project, as in any attempt at domestication, an intimate relationship between the pacification of external nature and the ordering of internal conflict. ``The process of domestication'', writes Hodder (1990, page 12), ``the control of the wild, is a meta- phor and mechanism for the control of society.'' The first thread of the story recounts the technical and scientific factors that drove the EU to pay closer attention to bees as a potential disruptor of its plans. Bees and other insects, it will be shown, fell under increasing regulatory scrutiny as officials and researchers shifted the unit of territorial analysis, from the individual fields and plots of the early studies of gene transfer to the ``landscape-scale'' regions where most of the research on `gene flow' is nowadays conducted. This was more, however, than a matter of enlarging or scaling up the area under investigation: research escalated, and in so doing brought to the fore a multiplicity of new, unexpected actors. The second thread in the story concerns the irruption of beekeepers as an uninvited stakeholder in the coexistence debate. When the EU began to develop rules to guaran- tee the isolation of GM crops, beekeepers saw their relationship with bees and consumers at risk. Since bees can collect and exchange pollen over distances of several kilometers, the separations introduced around fields of transgenic crops, at most a few hundred meters, would be insufficient to prevent the contamination of bee products with GM material. It slowly dawned on beekeepers that, if such GM organisms were allowed to be grown under the proposed coexistence schemes, the production and commercialization of non-GM honey, a key source of income, would become unfea- sible. If the EU, conversely, were to change its waysöbecome stricter, and mandate more stringent purity standards for conventional and organic cropsöit could do so only by limiting the mobility of bees. The only imaginable way of achieving this objective would be to restrict the movement of beekeepers and their colonies, confining their circulation to areas of the countryside with no transgenic cultivation. Either way, beekeeping, a form of parasitism of long standing in which the bee- keeper plays the relationship between plant and pollinator and extracts a benefit from it, is suddenly put at risk by new parasites: the GM organisms that threaten the marketability of natural honey with transgenic impurities, and the bureaucrats, who are either willing to permit the contamination of honey or will be driven to restrict the movement of beekeepers in order to safeguard the purity of conventional and organic farming. In reaction to this state of affairs, beekeepers have tried to deflect the EU's coexistence project and align it more closely with their own interests. In the process they have emerged as a vocal and unavoidable collective in the politics of transgenic life in Europe.(1) (1) The coexistence of bees and beekeepers does not fit easily with our models of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. Beekeepers emphasize the symbiotic nature of their attachment to bees, while some vegan and animal rights activists (to mention a radically different viewpoint) describe the relationship as one of exploitation, even slavery. Nick Bingham (2006) has employed the Derridian notion of `friendship' to understand the combination of radical otherness and mutual sociality that characterizes the concurrence of bees and beekeepers. Parasitism offers an alternative perspective on this connection, one that places the relationship between insects and their human keepers in the context of the multiple attempts at inclusion and exclusion generated by the arrival of unexpected visitors. Parasitism and the politics of transgenic life 3 In the interlinked and mutually interrupting threads that follow, politics will thus appear in the form, or through the figure of, the parasite. Parasitism refers here not only to an act of interference but to an interruption that ``invents something new'' (Serres 2007, page 35). New parasitic relations should be seen as the countermove to original acts of exclusionöa move that alters the political valence of the actors caught in the tale. Parasitism is in Serres's formulation, fundamental political form: ``The parasite has placed itself in the most profitable positions, at the intersection of relations. The elementary link of his individual activity was to relate to a relation; its performances are far better in spots where several relations cross or meet. It is at the knots of regulation, and suddenly, it relates to the collective. The one who succeeds in the relation of many-one, forms it and makes it work, is the politician and has found power. As is often said, he has the power of decision: of course, since he is at the crossings, the intercuttings: here, the intersections'' (Serres, 2007, page 43). Changes in the land In 1999 the EU decided to introduce a de facto moratorium on the commercializa- tion of GM organisms. Since then, transgenic crops have had a marginal presence in the European landscapeöthe most common type under cultivation is Bt maize, a variety engineered to produce its own pesticide and protect the plant (and its farmer) from the lepidopteran insects that have afflicted European agriculture for decades. Genetically
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