Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are produced by transferring genetic material from one species to another. Genetically altered or modified (GM) foods contain materials derived from such processes. Whereas traditional plant and animal breeding involves the crossing of individuals with desirable traits within a single species, genetic engineering allows more rapid and radical transformations. Examples include the transfer of genes from Arctic halibut into tomatoes to confer frost resistance, and the incorporation of Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria into corn or potatoes as a "natural" pesticide. Genetic engineering has also made possible the cheap and rapid synthesis of common food ingredients, such as yeasts, and of products like recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), which vastly increases an animal's milk production.

The criteria for classifying genetically altered foods vary among countries, depending on the strictness of their regulatory systems. Broadly speaking, these foods include genetically modified crops that people consume directly (ranging from strawberries to radicchio to rice); processed foods containing ingredients made from GM crops or products (corn syrup, soy flour, cheese made with GM rennet); and meat or produce from genetically modified or treated animals (GM salmon or rBGH milk). Some people would also include meat or produce from animals fed GM cereals.

The world's first GM crop, the Flavr-Savr tomato, was patented by the U.S. biotech company Calgene and approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1994. By 2005, 90 million hectares of GM crops, predominantly soy, corn, canola, and cotton, were grown globally; the United States was world leader, with 50 million hectares. The Grocery Manufacturers of America estimate that roughly 75 percent of U.S. processed foods contain GM ingredients; however, less than half the population is aware that GM foods are sold in supermarkets. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, supermarkets label foods containing GMOs, and pubs and restaurants proclaim their dishes "GM-free." In Brazil, farmers smuggled in GM soybean seed from Argentina to overcome an official ban, whereas French cheese makers and South Indian rice farmers demolished buildings in campaigns against GM crops. Biotech corporations insist that GM crops are essential to prevent world hunger, yet when famine loomed in 2002, the government of Zambia, after a public debate, chose to refuse GM corn sent by the United States as food aid. Why are there such radically different responses to GM foods?

GM crops and foods are new life-forms that promise great benefits, including higher yields, longer growing seasons, greater disease resistance, lower pesticide use, or extra vitamins. Any new technology also carries a spectrum of risks, however, and most battles over GM foods concern how risk should be defined and evaluated, and by whom. Proponents of GM foods try to restrict the debate to immediate health and environmental effects. Opponents insist that long-term effects and social and political impacts must also be considered.

No serious health risks related to GM foods have been demonstrated to date, and for developed world consumers, the advantages of GM foods would seem to outweigh the risks. From a farmer's perspective, however, the cost-benefit analysis is more complicated. One contentious issue is intellectual property rights. There are some public research programs working on GM subsistence crops for unrestricted use by poor farmers--for example, virus-free potatoes in Peru. But the design and testing of GM crops is expensive.

Highly capitalized biotech corporations thus produce most of the new varieties. For highest returns they concentrate on important commercial crops; design new varieties to respond only to their own agrichemical products; patent the gene sequences; and sell seed to farmers as the equivalent of software, bringing damages for any infringement of copyright, like replanting or exchanging seed. The promise of lower overall costs and better output led to rapid adoption by commercial farmers in the United States, but peasant farmers around the world passionately oppose GM seeds as a tool of corporate dominance and control, deliberately designed to deprive them of ownership of their seeds and control of their production methods.

In all organized protests against GM food, including the refusal of U.S. corn as food aid by the Zambians, there is an element of resistance to what is portrayed as American corporate imperialism: Although French and Swiss companies number among the biggest biotech corporations, the industry figurehead is the U.S. company Monsanto.

Another political formulation of risk is prominent in Europe, where issues of trust and governance come to the fore. The U.S. public generally has faith in the virtues of technology and business enterprise and trusts its regulatory bodies, but few Europeans trust government institutions or corporations to assess or manage technologies in the public interest. Citizen groups opposed government licensing of GMOs without public consultation as an example of "democratic deficit." The national debates that ensued broadened the issues from primarily health concerns to encompass environmental risks, citizen rights, the critique of industrial farming, definitions of a healthy society, and concerns for global justice. Consumer boycotts of GM products and of retailers who stocked them drove the message home, and sustained public pressure rapidly brought much stricter regulation of GMOs. Public action in other nations, such as Thailand, Japan, and New Zealand, followed similar patterns, linking consumer, producer, and citizen rights and building transnational coalitions. The global knock-on effects have impacted markets, dented the confidence of GM food producers, and forced biotech corporations to reconfigure their strategies.

Biotech corporations and U.S. trade officials like to argue that foreign opposition to GM foods stems from irrational emotionalism and scientific ignorance. Yet research shows that the more technical information individuals acquire about GM crops and foods, the more likely they are to oppose them. A better understanding of how GMOs are designed, produced, and controlled inevitably extends perception of risks beyond the narrow framework of space, time, and stakeholders that the GM industry and its supporters have sought to impose. The case of GM foods thus illustrates intrinsic tensions between technocracy and scientific literacy within contemporary democracies.

Bibliography:

1) Bray, Francesca. 2003. "Genetically Modified Foods: Shared Risk and Global Action." Pp. 185-207 in Revising Risk: Health Inequalities and Shifting Perceptions of Danger and Blame, edited by B. Herr Harthorn and L. Oaks. London: Praeger.

2) Conway, Gordon. 2000. "Genetically Modified Crops: Risks and Promise." Conservation Ecology 4(1):2.

3) Gutteling, Jan, Lucien Hanssen, Neil van der Veer, and Erwin Sydel. 2006. "Trust in Governance and the Acceptance of Genetically Modified Food in the Netherlands." Public Understanding of Science 15:103-12.

4) Murphy, Joseph, Les Levidow, and Susan Carr. 2006. "Understanding the US-European Union Conflict over Genetically Modified Crops." Social Studies of Science 36(1):133-60.

5) Mwale, Pascal Newbourne. 2006. "Societal Deliberation on Genetically Modified Maize in Southern Africa: The Debateness and the Publicness of the Zambian National Consultation on Genetically Modified Maize Food Aid in 2002." Public Understanding of Science 15:89-102.

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