Nowadays, policy makers consider public participation in innovation policies essential for their success. In the past, opposition to new technologies has often been dismissed as ‘luddism’, attributed to public ignorance and explained in terms of a ‘deficit’ in public understanding of science and technology. Such views, although by no means dead, have recently been widely discredited. Public anxieties should be taken into account more seriously. Public participation would encourage people to learn about new technologies. Participation is assumed to legitimate the resulting policies and to build public trust in governance. Technologies have to be ‘socially robust’ as well as technically sound. A wide variety of recent initiatives in this area are currently assessed and attempts at standardization and benchmarking are underway.[1]
Obviously, the recent shift in policy views was inspired by food scandals such as the BSE crises and the controversy over GM food. In Europe it is also closely associated with emerging European regulatory regimes. Prominent members of the STS community paved the way for the change, with studies that showed the ‘deficit hypothesis’ to be ill founded and deficient. Yet, to claim a final victory for the pro-participatory views advocated by STS scholars would be premature. The reception in the policy bureaucracies have been mixed. “Elitists’” views on public understanding and participation are still at hand, as a close reading of policy documents reveals.[2]
Instead of becoming overjoyed by its success, STS should be more cautious and critical, and take a closer look at the new participatory initiatives. Are they indeed an improvement? If so why, and where? Or are they yet another form of ‘politics as usual’, geared to lure the public to accept developments that are already irreversible? Empirical STS analyses and theoretical reflection should address such questions. For that a readjustment the intellectual and political agenda of STS seems required. Below I will present some material about the GM food debate in The Netherlands to illustrate some of the issues.
The Netherlands’ food and genes debate and NGOs: building new forms of public representation The Dutch debate about GM food and agricultural biotechnology was initiated by parliament in 1999 and took place in 2001. Between 1999 and 2001 the debate was designed in negotiations between stakeholder groups and representatives of the government. As it turned out, the NGOs and government representatives held quite different views on the questions to be asked and the role stakeholder organizations should play. Those in charge of preparations at the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Conservancy, and Fisheries were inspired by the new perspectives on participation. They wanted to create as much room as possible for ‘ordinary citizens’ to learn about the new technology and to express their own views on possible uses. In such a debate NGOs and industry were supposed to be ‘supporting actors’ and ‘facilitators’ rather than ‘key players’ or ‘leading actors’. Yet, these representatives of the government also thought that a discussion about the acceptability of biotechnology as such was void and useless. Biotechnology exists as an irreversible fact, they argued, and Dutch politics would have to deal with its consequences for agriculture and food production. NGOs wanted a debate about the acceptability of biotechnology in agriculture as such as well as about alternative solutions to problems in food production. For them the question about whether specific applications of biotechnology would be acceptable and beneficial, should be preceded by a more general debate about food problems, risks and needs.
Preliminary consultations showed that industry and NGOs were keen to participate in a debate, but saw the debate mainly as a platform to put forward their own views. There were few signs that the opposing parties were prepared to reconsider their positions during or after the debate.[3] This encouraged the government to limit the influence of such groups as much as possible. A public replay of a debate between the entrenched would serve no purpose. Instead it was decided that the debate should offer opportunities for ordinary citizens to learn about new products based on bio-technology and to form opinions about the boundary conditions and limits to be set with respect to the introduction of such products.
The NGOs disagreed with this framing of the central questions as well as with the role accorded to them in the debate. Yet, they decided to go along with the debate and to see whether they could redirect it at a later stage. Immediately after its installation, however, the organizing committee made it clear it would not take orders from radical NGOs:
“…I would like to keep it out of the sphere of the ‘believers’. On the one hand there are those who are convinced it will be beneficial to people and on the other hand there is Greenpeace, certain that it will lead us to world destruction. Such people never convince one another”.[4]
In line with the recommendation of a governmental working party that had prepared the debate, the Committee decided to focus activities on a number of already known as well as some imaginary applications of bio-technology. For each of these products arguments for and against would be listed. Participants were supposed to review these arguments and to add arguments of their own. After long deliberations between the committee, the agencies involved and the stakeholder groups, nine examples were chosen. They included: a sustainable tomato, herbicide-resistant corn, a BSE free cow, cholesterol reducing milk, fungi-resistant potatoes, terminator seed, and vitamin A enriched Rice (golden rice).
These products were the starting points for the various debating activities to be organized. A controlled focus group experiment would be at the core of the entire process. Six focus groups of twenty-five people each would be formed in such a way that the results would be more or less representative for the Dutch general public. The focus groups would meet twice. In between the sessions a special meeting would be organized in which the Committee would interrogate experts about questions that had emerged in the first round of focus group discussions. Participants in the focus groups were encouraged to take part in the panel meeting.
Alongside the focus group discussions a wide range of public debate activities would be organized.[5] 5 Public meetings at the local level were stimulated and subsidized, provided the organizers would come up with a report. Special lessons at schools were prepared. An interactive website was launched and advertisements and calls to participate were to be published. A limited number of national events was envisaged to get mass media coverage. A specially designed toolbox with information material, a booklet describing the nine examples, survey forms, and a video introducing the debate was put together. Opinion surveys before and after the debate were organized to assess the opinions of the general public about GM food and to assess the effects of the debate. At a rather late stage a special web-based debate was initiated to include voices and views related to the situation in developing countries.
The choice of products to be discussed and especially the information video became crystallization points for pitched battles between the organizers and the critical NGOs. A first version of the video was presented at the public launch of the debate in May 2001. It was immediately rejected by the NGO as biased in favor of GM food. The Committee itself was unhappy with the video as well and ordered a remake. The result was presented after the summer. Once again the NGOs said it was unacceptable. They demanded a more balanced presentation in which non-GM alternatives to solve food problems would be put on an equal footing. They demanded that the current video should be withdrawn from the ‘toolbox’ and the debate. The Committee refused to do this. In response fifteen NGOs walked out and announced that they would organize their own debate. The move was officially deplored by the Committee, but members also made it clear they were fed up with the tactics of the NGOs.
By then the controversy between the critical NGOs and the Committee had become the main topic in the mass media coverage of the debate. It overshadowed and tainted the debate about GM food and would continue to do so. The debate about GM food had become at least as much a debate about the role of critical and especially semi-professional NGOs such as Greenpeace in civic deliberations as it was a debate about GM food. Once the final report had been published with conclusions that were not particularly surprising given the design of the debate, members of the Committee lashed out at the critical NGOs in interviews. For example:
“I am a member of almost all of these organizations …but I never received a letter at home in which we were asked for our opinion. This raises questions about the functioning of such organizations. With their highly ethical and moralizing standpoints they are much more detached from what …people find than they are willing to acknowledge. They are diehard idealists”.[6]
The Dutch debate and examples of similar debates in other countries suggest that public participation exercises will become a fifth form of representation of the public alongside and possibly in competition with already existing forms. If formal elections for parliaments are the first form political representation, mass movements and civic groups constitute a second form. Professional mass media constitute a third form of public opinion and public opinion surveys are a fourth form of representing what the public thinks. Government-initiated exercises of public participation should be added to this list as a fifth form. Of course, these various forms overlap and are co-extensive, but this should not blind us to tensions and competition between these various forms. Their relations should be carefully assessed and the new form should be analysed in terms of its performativity and civic epistemology, i.e., whether and how a new conception of citizenship is framed and promoted at the level of substantive issues as well as in terms of the attitudes, qualifications and behaviours required from participants.
Configuring citizenship The information video provides a good entry point to analyze the conception of citizenship implied in the ‘Food and Genes Debate’. Just like literary texts can be said to have an ‘implied reader’, the video has an implied conception of scientific citizenship. A key role is played by the voice-over. The voice-over is the key narrator and the publics’ representative in the video story. It voices questions and concerns that are supposed to be on the public’s mind. What is at stake in the debate about GM food? What should we - the public - expect? What to make of the contrasting arguments and views? What are the risks involved; what beneficial effects do protagonists expect?
The video is divided into a general introduction and several sections in which the exemplary products are discussed. At the beginning we see people engaged in their everyday business in supermarkets and on farms. We see bottles of wine and beer and bread and we are reminded that we have used biotechnology through the ages. But now something has changed. It is now possible to intervene at the level of the hereditary materials themselves in new and radically different ways. An animation video starts and explains the basic principles using images of DNA and RNA floating in empty space and a pair of scissors. Click, click, it is that easy! But should we do it? Is it safe? What are the risks and benefits? Aren’t we playing God?
A white-coated scientist appears in a pop-up window. He looks directly at us and announces that an endless variety of new products is on its way, even though environmental activists cause delays. His pop-up window closes and new ones appear that show us other experts. These experts are in charge of safety regulation. They tell the audience that there are no significant risks, i.e., that these risks are under control. Regulatory frameworks have been sufficiently elaborated recently and although there are still some problems left, the basic framework is solid and adequate. Other experts pop up and tell the audience to be less certain. One key academic expert is an ecologist (no white coat, filmed outside and looking away from the camera). He points out that genetic reproduction is fundamentally uncertain and cautions us. We are only beginning to understand the complexities involved, so we should be careful. When he is finished the voice-over points out that this scientific uncertainty may not apply to all applications of biotechnology, but is associated with quite a lot of them. It is time to become more specific and a new section in the video starts in which the genetically modified tomato is presented as a first product that is already available.
Subsequently, various examples of GM food products are presented in separate sections of the video. There is also a separate section on risk and a part is devoted to a discussion of Golden rice and to food problems in the Third World. Each section repeats the format just described. The voice-over introduces the product or issue and the first questions. Subsequently, experts appear in pop-up windows and address the question as well as other issues put forward. The expert voices include scientists, economists, regulators, representatives from NGO’s (Greenpeace, Consumers Association), representatives from industry, agriculture and an organic farmer. For a single product the majority of experts seem to agree that it makes no sense, but about most of the other GM products opinions are balanced.
Throughout, the focus of the video is on the new products envisaged. Alternatives are only presented in relation to the discussed GM product and appear to have their own problems and limitations. Time and again the same questions are raised: What are the envisaged advantages? Is the product economically viable? What are the risks? Will it make the farmers more dependent on agriculture giants and the seed industry? Will products be labeled to guarantee consumer freedom? Will there be a product line of GM free food?
The video is carefully balanced. The space allotted to the protagonists and opponents appearing in pop-up windows is more or less equal. And yet, the entire flow of the argument frames the spectator/citizen as a pragmatist, a consumer and, at least implicitly, as an adherent of the institutional division between state and economy - maybe a skeptical one, but nevertheless… State intervention is almost exclusively associated with issues of health and safety. It is assumed that the fate of food products - whether ‘GM’ or ‘organic’- will be decided at the market. Consumer freedom should be guaranteed, but through labeling and safety regulation Agricultural practices should be allowed unless they conflict with such regulations or endanger the natural environment.
This implicit conception of citizenship is as much encouraged by what is said and presented as by what has been left out. The question, ‘Aren’t we playing God?’, is indeed raised at the beginning but it is never addressed in the video after that. The same goes for other ethical concerns. Only environmental safety and health issues are mentioned. With respect to starvation in the Third World, seed companies will offer terms of trade to farmers that will take care of objections. While opponents and skeptics raise doubts and point out that the new rice strains will not solve the problems, self-confident entrepreneurs radiate a ‘can do’ mentality and point out their civic respectability.
With respect to political decision making the video is completely silent. The implied citizens are presented as undifferentiated members of the public writ large. Apparently they are Dutch, but no specification is ever given of the polity of which they are supposed to be a part. How that polity is restricted by international agreements and European treaties already in place is not mentioned either. Apparently, the civic debate is to be about products of biotechnology and not about sovereignty, democracy and the global economic order. The latter only surfaces in the form of concerns about the increasing dependence of farmers on big industry. Remedial measures for this are mainly discussed and presented in connection with the farmers in the Third World.
The way of framing just sketched also has consequences for science and scientific knowledge in relation to citizenship. Fundamental scientific questions are not presented as particularly relevant in a direct way. The technology is presented in a black-boxed version and fundamental questions are side-stepped in favor of a discussion about risks and safety issues in connection with specific products and cross-pollination. Insofar as these are framed as technical risk issues, the citizen is once again framed as an outsider, listening to experts and hopefully well represented by experts from NGOs and by the consumers association. More general political, economic and ethical questions with respect to food are not considered to be topics for extensive consideration and expert commentary.
Conclusion The Dutch debate about GM food has been inspired by the new ideas about participation that have recently emerged. Yet, it is also clear that the design of the debate also diverged from the principles recommended by prominent STS scholars. Of course, it would be quite naïve to attribute this to a limited understanding of STS analyses. The Dutch debate functioned as a political machine. It promoted particular versions of the problems the political system faces and ignored or deflated other versions. More than in other cases it worked to delegitimize NGOs, but that aspect should not blind us to the fact that public participation exercises will always be selective and will implicitly or explicitly promote certain versions of citizenship and the problems we face instead of others. Claims that we are now given space to ‘ordinary citizens’ or ‘average consumers’ do not automatically imply that democracy and public deliberations are indeed enhanced. And neither should a public display of modesty on the side of experts be taken as proof for that. We have to investigate these new participatory exercises more closely, especially now that policy makers and marketing experts around the globe have started to embrace them. Are we indeed looking at new conceptions of citizenship emerging? Or are we looking at the latest version of ‘politics as usual’? Or is it a restyling of existing conceptions of citizenship and economic liberalism to address problems of international economic competition and corporate exploitation of science? Most importantly is the question of how to distinguish more systematically and in an empirically informed manner between these various interpretations?
The research on which this article is based is part of work for the EU funded thematic network STAGE. See: http://www.stage-research.net. A more detailed and comprehensive analysis of the Dutch debate and its more general implications is in preparation. The author thanks Myrthe Egmond for her support.
Notes
A year and a half ago I was on the inside of a Dutch government think tank. The think tank, Infodrome, had as its mandate to inform and inspire governmental and parliamentary officials to take up information society issues. What does government do with the Internet (that it wasn’t already doing)?
My position was that the Internet, amongst its other popular manifestions as e-commerce marketplace, library, rumour mill, music swap meet, den of software pirates and paedophiles, and the great conversation ongoing on email and chat rooms – apart from all that, it could also be thought of as a debate space around important social issues. If, however, you entered a social issue into a search engine, including a Dutch search engine – issues like climate change, xenotransplantation, or gm food -the government was absent in the returns. The places people would go to find out about important social issues was not the government, if one considers a search engine a main entry point to the Web. If you wanted the government’s view, you’d have to surf government. And who, after all, surfs government, apart from government itself and a previous Dutch Minister without portfolio, called van Boxtel?
I thought that if the government wanted to be more visible in the information society it had to become more present in relevant web spaces.
At the same time government was beginning to learn some insights. It decided to create independent portals, like the health kiosk – gezondheidskiosk.nl. With the health kiosk initiative, government, via a specially created NGO – perhaps better called a GONGO, a government-organized NGO –was trying to make a popular portal. They wanted to enter the health space on the Internet, because they held the view that the Web was dangerous, or more drastically, that the Web could kill you.
The problem with the health kiosk, however, was that it was run by strict editors. They hardly let anyone post information to the site. And nobody went there anyway, apart from the few folks that were allowed to post.
My view was that the government, instead of authoring these sorts of spaces that disappoint, better first find out what’s going on in other more relevant spaces on the Web.
Around the time of this discussion, a ‘real’ public debate was about to take place, on food safety, with the emphasis on gm food. I was approached by one of the Infodrome staff who said that the issue was heating up. She pointed me to an AVRO TV news program where a number of important Dutch folks came on the show, and put forward their views. The newspapers also were saying that the issue was heating up, indeed that there was a debate underway.
So Infodrome asked me to find that debate, and tell them what it was about. They knew I’d check the stories as well as the Internet. Here is what I found.
1) TV news and newspaper journalists interviewed a number of people in the issue area, took their statements, and juxtaposed them against one another. Statement juxtaposition in the media was called a debate. Statement juxtaposition, I thought, could also be masking the absence of a debate.
2) Next I went to see what organic farmers were saying. They were inviting people to go to agro-tourism events, buy their produce, subscribe to a magazine, look in the supermarkets for their carefully codified labels. Only one of them in this space – the alternative consumers’ union – alternatieve consumenten bond - was taking positions, trying to debate something – labels. All others were not in any debate at all.
3) The NRC Handelsblad had a dossier – a file – on their site with all the organizations they thought were in the ‘debate’. The debate dossier pointed to particular pages on each of these organizations’ websites, where statements are made about their views. Of these sites only 4 of the 20 organizations actually had views. And only two taking positions were Dutch. The Dutch consumers’ union argued that gm food requires labels, and those labels should be on all gm food products. And the government had no other position than saying that there should be a debate.
4) Intriguingly, two other actors showed up in this Dutch establishment newspaper’s space – the EU and the Codex Alimentarius. The Codex, based in Washington, DC, puts forward proposed standards and regulations. They put forward that only those GM products known to cause allergies should be labelled. No other gm products should be labelled. The EU said that that was the policy that would be followed.
So, most importantly – number five - the Dutch food safety debate was taking place outside the Netherlands. Of the establishment parties, only the Consumers’ Union, and of the organic folks, only the alternative consumers’ union, seemed to be aware of the debate.
Then came the real government-organized public debate – months of it. I’d just like to point to one crucial event in this debate to make an overall point. During the public debate, 15 key Dutch NGOs left it, citing distrust in the process and pre-mediated outcomes. Among them was the Alternative Consumers Union.
Many commentators have called these NGOs bad sports, asocial, even anti-democratic. Studies also were commissioned by government to find out what was going on with these NGOs – studies that also found them to be a potential threat to democracy because of their lack of accountability. As Tony Blair and George Bush also said, safely within the red zone at the Genoa G8 summit, these people protesting here are unelected. The real people are at home, in front of the television sets, getting our messages. I would like to argue that the NGOs were not so much leaving the debate, as leading us to it, bringing us back to where the debate is taking place, if we are willing enough to want to locate it. The debate was not going on in the Netherlands, and if we would like the debate to be going on here, we would have to import it. Interestingly, the 15 Dutch NGOs that left the debate did just that. They set up their own counter-debate in the Netherlands, discussing the issues being debated outside of the Netherlands.
In conclusion I have a methodological point as well as a normative one. Methodologically, if one is to hold a public debate on an important social issue in the Netherlands, one should locate where the debate on this social issue is taking place, and who is in it. What I am saying is that if government wishes to ‘author’ a national public debate, it should make sure that the terms of the debate are germane to those national actors already in the debate. If the terms are not interesting to them, government comes across as a newbie, as someone who has not read the FAQs, the frequently asked questions.
Normatively, I would like to ask whether government ought to ever ‘author’ debate? The advice eventually given to the think tank was that government should capture and put on display ongoing social debate. It should subsequently strive to position itself in this ongoing debate, instead of authoring its own.
Finally, instead of inviting the organic farmers to the government building, I proposed that we see them instead at the Saturday farmers’ market.
No modified genes in our food! The movement against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has been very successful within the European Union. In many member countries there is a ban on field experiments and the import of genetically modified food from outside the Union on the consumer market has been postponed again and again. Recently the Union agreed to open the market for GM food, yet the proposed regulations make experts doubt that innovations in this field will ever gain momentum in Europe. The fate of GMOs in Europe seems to be a source of rejoice for the STS community. Not only does it falsify technological determinism, the case also illustrates a new form of supranational politics. Apparently, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Greenpeace can influence the shape of European innovation politics, using new strategies and arguments. Moreover the controversy seems to prove a favorite STS point: in the debate on GMOs ‘science’ does not play the role of a neutral arbiter, but is enrolled in the battle by both sides.
Yet there is a mysterious twist to the case. It is obvious that we should stop risky technologies. But why oppose efforts to find out what the risks are? That’s exactly what the anti-GMO movement wants, however. Starting in the nineties NGOs like Greenpeace have almost continuously set up campaigns for banning field experiments with GM crops. This Greenpeace policy did amaze most scientists in biotechnology and chemistry, to put it mildly. Why oppose something before testing it? That goes against the grain of science. I have two questions. First, what is the source of this alienation between mainstream natural science and, in particular, Greenpeace? Is it just another example of sloppy science on the Greenpeace side, as in the celebrated Brent Spar case, or are we dealing with a more fundamental difference? Second, Greenpeace markets itself as a science oriented pressure group. But is it really possible to oppose new technologies in a categorical way within a scientific language game or style of reasoning? Let’s have a closer look at the GMO controversy.
The basic antagonists in the debate are, on the pro-GMOs side, the biotech industry (like Monsanto) but also some public agencies and research groups, and on the anti-GMO’s side, environmental NGOs (like Greenpeace), consumer-groups, the bio-food movement, development NGOs, religious groups. The pro-rhetoric tells us that GM Food is nothing new, GM Food is safe, and GM Food has only positive social effects. The Monsanto site sums it up nicely: “Today, biotechnology holds out promise for consumers seeking quality, safety and taste in their food choices; for farmers seeking new methods to improve their productivity and profitability; and for governments and non-governmental public advocates seeking to stave off global hunger, assure environmental quality, preserve bio-diversity and promote health and food safety.” The anti-rhetoric counters these claims by saying: GM Food is something completely new, GM Food generates new risks, and GM Food will increase global inequalities. So to each argument pro there is an argument contra, and visa versa. In effect there is not much real debate going on. Opinions are frozen and the frontline of the GMO controversy turns out to be quite static.
From a sociological point of view we can diagnose these states of affairs as elements of a new global complexity or a World Risk Society in which no objective knowledge of the future can be obtained. Yet there is no need to switch immediately to the cynical worldview, according to which arguments carry no weight in themselves. If only power counts, people’s passion to engage in arguments is difficult to understand. Moreover within a cynical worldview the special role of NGOs like Greenpeace within the public arena remains unacknowledged. One important reason for their increased popularity is that in an age of industrial incidents and bad functioning governments NGOs succeeded in cultivating an image of being decent, trustful advocates of the common interest. NGOs do have much less resources than industries and governments. But let us not underestimate their power. Some of them are able to organize very effective media campaigns. On the GMO issue, in the late 1990’s Greenpeace won an important media battle against companies like Monsanto and retailers like Iceland. The so-called Eurobarometer shows its effect till now: the majority of the Europeans don’t want GM Food. However, this success generates a dilemma, in particular for NGO’s. In order to live up to their image of decency they do not want to be seen as screwed P.R. machines. They prefer to position themselves as independent groups representing the public interest, giving voice to suppressed causes like nature and the poor. In addition they associate themselves with ‘science’, of which they like to present themselves as ‘honest’ spokespersons, at the same time demarcating their own public role from governments and companies.
Now, this self image, if taken seriously, has consequences for the way NGO’s relate to science. Obviously it implies a reverence for truth and facts, but there is more to it. In cases of new technologies we are dealing with the prospective assessment of possible risks. Here we leave the area of hard facts, entering the field of attitudes toward the future: how serious do we take uncertainties, how cautious should we be, where to put the burden of proof, etcetera. The reasons for the alienation between Greenpeace and science should be found in this second area, I assert. Embodied in science is a very specific attitude toward the future, which Greenpeace won’t accept, at least not in the GMO controversy. The problem is that Greenpeace tried to reconcile two fundamentally different styles of reasoning.
In the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Ernst Gombrich defines ‘style’ as follows: “The distinctive character of styles [..] rests on the adoption of certain conventions which are learned and absorbed by those who carry on the tradition. While certain of these features are easily recognizable (e.g., the Gothic pointed arch, the cubist facet, Wagnerian chromaticism), others are more elusive, since they are found to consist not in the presence of individual, specifiable elements but in the regular occurrence of certain clusters of features and in the exclusion of certain elements.” This definition suggests, in our case, to look at specific examples in which NGOs like Greenpeace refer to scientific research. In those examples then we should try to trace (recognizable or elusive) regular features, not of painting but of reasoning. Moreover, in a similar vain as Gombrich did, we try to trace blind spots these styles of reasoning generate.
A representative example of the way Greenpeace reacts to pieces of scientific GM research, is this press message, issued on February 22, 2002 by Greenpeace USA .
London/Washington - The US National Academy of Sciences is expected to release a report later today that criticizes the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for inadequately protecting the environment from the risks of genetically engineered (GE) plants and calls on the USDA to make its review process for the GE plants “significantly more transparent and rigorous.” (…)
“This report exposes another example of corporate interests trumping environmental protection and the public interest,” said Dr. Doreen Stabinsky, science advisor to Greenpeace. “The USDA has to start doing its own homework and stop turning in work done by the biotech industry. By failing to seriously address the threats posed by gene-altered plants, the USDA has broken trust with the American people.” (…)
The USDA has virtually no special regulations for managing such crops, though dozens of varieties are currently grown. Companies developing such crops merely notify the USDA when planning to grow them in open fields.
“Politicians from the US travel the globe boasting that their regulations are the tightest in the world,” said Charles Margulis, Greenpeace USA GE specialist. “But scientists know the truth - the US is more concerned with protecting biotech business than with protecting the environment or the public health.”
One regular feature of Greenpeace’s handling of scientific papers or reports on GMOs can be found in this text. Through phrases like ‘The report exposes another example of….’ the expert assessment of the regulatory agency USDA is put in an interpretative frame in which corporate interests oppose public interests. The report was commissioned by the department itself and is not antagonistic in purpose or tone. Yet without any hesitation Greenpeace’s own GE specialist Charles Margulis puts the report in the conflicting interest frame.
Furthermore we can ask, in the spirit of Gombrich, is there is some feature in the ‘Executive Summary’ which is excluded from the Greenpeace text? There is. In the report Bezeten van Genen, on which this article is based, the press release is compared with its source - the 16-page Executive Summary of the US National Academy report, published some days before the full study. It contains an extensive argument, concluding that ‘the transgenic process presents no new categories of risk compared to conventional methods of crop improvement’ (my emphasis). Instead it argues that ‘risks must be assessed on a case-by-case basis with consideration for the organism, trait, and environment’ (my emphasis). The ‘Executive Summary’, I conclude, rejects quite clearly a principal or categorical difference between genetic modification and other forms of refining breeding, in the sense that genetic modification can be connected to a new category of risk. The report of the American Academy doesn’t say that genetic manipulation is safe; it holds that it depends in each case on the context.
Although the claim that GMOs generate new categories of risks is central to the Greenpeace case, this finding is not mentioned in their press release. That’s no accident: in all their press releases (and other publications too) on the GMO subject we find the same ‘stylistic’ feature: Greenpeace ‘chooses’ to ignore to take in account the contextual reasoning on which scientific findings and recommendations are based. This feature, I suggest, is part of the categorical style of reasoning Greenpeace uses in its anti-GMO campaigns. Within the context of that style there is simply no room for contextual arguments.
I call the Greenpeace style ‘categorical’ after its central claim that there is a categorical difference between genetic and non-genetic modification. Other features are associated with this idea. As soon as you reason in categories, you are inclined to frame single reports as signs of a larger pattern. As soon as you reason in categories, you are not inclined to see much middle ground or options for consensus. Another reason to call Greenpeace style ‘categorical’ is because it opposes a more contextual style of reasoning which dominates practices of established science. What does ‘contextual’ mean in this setting? It’s a relative term; contextual reasoning is contextual compared to categorical reasoning. To be more precise: 1. In contextual reasoning the (methodological) distinction between potentiality and actuality makes more sense than in categorical reasoning. 2. People who reason contextually more often say ‘it depends’. This phrase does not imply that you’re not interested in causal relations; it states that in which cases which ‘laws’ apply cannot be said beforehand. It depends upon ‘ceteris paribus factors’. 3. In contextual reasoning the assessment of risks is more closely related to problems of interactive complexity. In contextual reasoning it is relevant to know, as in the National Academy example, where the transgenic gene is taken from, but this information is not decisive. What transgenic mobility means depends upon the whole ecological context in which a ‘strange’ gene is implanted. 4. In contextual reasoning more often an inductive approach prevails. This means you go case by case; advice policy makers to monitor things closely, because you cannot predict the future. 5. In contextual reasoning the distinction between scientific values and social values is seen as more important. 6. Contextual reasoning favours a passive tone.
Categorical reasoning has a lot of advantages, especially if you’re fighting a decentralized media war on many fronts, as is normally the case in the network society of today. Clear categories of what is right or wrong, risky or not risky can be of great help in coordinating action and creating political momentum. But NGOs like Greenpeace should be more aware of the limitations of this style of reasoning. Categorical reasoning has the disadvantage of creating ‘news poverty’. Within the anti GM Food movement, again and again you hear ‘the mister Putszai story’ or ‘the Monarch butterfly story’, for instance. More importantly, this style encourages weak reasoning and a tolerance for fallacies like ‘pars pro toto’ and ‘jumping to conclusions’. Finally it forces NGOs to work with an inconsistent philosophy of science and technology.
This last point leaves NGOs with a real handicap. In debating the future in general, environmental NGOs oppose scientific determinism and the belief in technological fixes. ‘Yellow rice’? – adding vitamin A to rice, in order to fight blindness in third world countries? Bad idea. The real problem is malnutrition. The philosophy of science and technology in all this is contextual: let us not ascribe, as biotechnological industries do, to inherent (positive) traits of technologies.
At the same time though GMOs are not treated contextually. They should be banned, all of them. Here the intellectual tension becomes clear - the more a categorical style dominates your discourse, the more you are inclined to focus just on the technology itself, apart from ecological, social or cultural contexts. Science and technology, deconstructed with one hand, is reified with the other. A key difference with the pro-GMO movement should be noticed here. The pro’s not only favour GMOs; they also ascribe to science and technology direct beneficial effects. So in their case there is no tension between technology assessment and style of reasoning, as in the case of the contra-movement.
To conclude, the movement against GMOs is not just handicapped because it has less money or less institutional power. An important weakening factor is its inconsistent philosophy of technology. Using categorical arguments in scientific environments alienates scientists (and engineers). Discrediting possibilities of fixing problems with new technologies, assuming that technology has no meaning outside social and cultural contexts, while at the same time fixing or reifying technologies you are critical of, assuming that technology can have a fixed meaning, is a habit that alienates at least one philosopher.
Note This article is based on Rein de Wilde, Niki Vermeulen, Mirko Reithler, Bezeten van Genen. Een essay over de innovatieoorlog rondom genetisch gemodificeerd voedsel, Sdu Uitgevers, Den Haag 2002. This book is published in the Series ‘Voorstudies en Achtergronden’ van de Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid (V117) and can be downloaded as PDF file from the site www.wrr.nl. References can be found in the original publication.