Decolonizing the GMO debate – The Counter

Looping back to the twinned premises of the boilerplate GMO defense, my worry over scientism is only the half of it. Pair that with a technological fix mindset, and I grew even more unsettled at a mismatch in debates over food systems reform.

To that end, I should say that although I study the history of science, technology, and agriculture, I spend most of my time with engineers and scientists. In that capacity, Ive spent more energy than Id like to admit rebutting technical fixes to more-than-technical problems. Most of those other classes I was teaching the past dozen years have aimed at helping engineers-in-training come to their work with a more culturally attuned concept of technology. As in, technologies are not merely value-free objects sitting on the shelf. They are, rather, systems of people, activities, knowledge, and organization. They carry the history of their origins, the values of the institutions that shaped them, and the cultural context in which people use them.

Understanding that technologies are human-based systems counters a presumption that technology can ever be a value-free or value-neutral physical object. You can say your computer is a metal frame and plastic screen, for example, or your car is a steel hull with an engine bolted to it. But most people recognize that those are not very good descriptions of a car or computer. The computer is also the software, the maintenance, the aesthetics, the battery, the knowledge to navigate and manipulate it, and on and on. Those elements all come to us from human decisions about what to design and what is worth paying for. They are, that is, full of human values.

Too often, the GMO Defense genre misses that core tenet to promote a view of GMOs as a neutral technology. Recipient nations should accept them as obviously beneficial. Sure, there were problems in the early years, we read in the Times profile, but readers are asked to believe Monsanto has cleaned those up. GMO advocate and environmental writer Mark Lynas tells readers that seeing a crop [of modified rice] that had such obvious lifesaving potential ruined by anti-GMO activists was the angriest hed ever felt, the suggestion being that resistance meant you were foolish or, worse, anti-modern. Yes, G.M.O.s were [initially] introduced to the public as a corporate product, focused on profit, but they need not be that way still. GMO critics have long argued over the implications of monoculture and the environmental resource draw of the technologywater, Roundup, soil quality, etc.but readers are told we need not worry about those anymore.

See the rest here:
Decolonizing the GMO debate - The Counter