NGO Discourses in the Debate on Genetically Modified Crops by Ksenia Gerasimova

Author:Ksenia Gerasimova [Gerasimova, Ksenia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations)
ISBN: 9781315403489
Google: IMEtDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-20T11:38:55+00:00

He used the rising poverty in the world as an illustration of the neo-liberal regime’s imperfections. The production paradigm argued by economists such as Paul Collier and Henry Bernstein, who supported the globalisation of food production, is global industrialised farming and food production or ‘the global market-driven paradigm’. In turn, Bello offered ‘a local-market-centred paradigm’ as an alternative (Bello, 2009, p. 5).

One sector was viewed as particularly dangerous to the local-market-centred model: genetic engineering, which was seen as ‘wrestling almost complete control of the actual physical process of production from [smallholder farming] and promised to correct the diseconomies of large-scale production that had allowed the family farm to survive’ (Bello, 2009, p. 33). Biotechnology, he argued, has contributed to the spread of global capital by including new organisms in the input commodity production of food and a vertical integration of a global firm (Bello, 2009, p. 33).

Bello argued that the rise of biotechnology within the food industry has only strengthened such a global market-based production model, removing the farmer from production, ‘accelerate[d] his or her dispossession and conversion into a rural worker’ (Bello, 2009, p. 38). Bello dismissed the argument that smallholdings are less productive and innovative than large-scale farming, as posited by Collier, for example. He instead cited van der Ploeg, who wrote that ‘technology is not only about linking artefacts and governing material flows – it is much about interlinking people in specific ways in order to obtain the rights kind of conditions and flows’ (van der Ploeg, 2008, cited in Bello, 2009). In that sense, big business can produce only a ‘standardized outflow’, while small-scale farming can better deal with ‘specificity or variation’ and ‘advanced science and peasant agriculture’ should not be in contradiction but rather be incorporated into one another (Bello, 2004, p. 142). On the other side, GM seeds were enriching corporations and extending production chains. With ‘terminator seed’ biotechnology, he argued, ‘could in fact provide the death blow to the peasantry’ (Bello, 2004, p. 33). Bello reflected upon technocracies and referred to Kuhn’s idea of cycles of scientific development, pointing to a modern scientific paradigm crisis, the main root of this crisis lies in the process of corporate-led globalisation (Bello, 2000).

Bello identified GM seeds as a tool for competing over global influence, not just in developing countries by Western nations but also among themselves. He recognised that Western countries compete for global influence and referred to ‘a strong corporate lobby’ that believes that the environmental concerns of GM crops are imposed by Europe as part of a competitive strategy (Bello, 2004, p. xviii).

At the time of Seattle, the search for an alternative to global rough capitalism was popular. Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair articulated the vision of ‘compassionate globalisation’, a ‘Third way’ providing ‘a new alternative… on the centre and centre-left’ of politics but with ‘clear values of social justice, democracy, cooperation’ which was a combination of the liberal commitment to free trade and the social democratic commitment. It was denied by alterglobalists such as Shiva and Bello (Bello, 2000).

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