{"id":3898,"date":"2022-12-08T20:34:36","date_gmt":"2022-12-08T20:34:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/?p=3898"},"modified":"2022-12-08T20:34:36","modified_gmt":"2022-12-08T20:34:36","slug":"reimagining-food-farming-humanity-ecomodernisms-dystopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fitadelphia.com\/index.php\/2022\/12\/08\/reimagining-food-farming-humanity-ecomodernisms-dystopia\/","title":{"rendered":"Reimagining Food, Farming & Humanity: Ecomodernism\u2019s Dystopia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Colin todhunter<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cEcomodernists offer no solutions to contemporary problems other than technical innovation and further integration into private markets which are structured systematically by centralized state power in favour of the wealthy\u2026\u201dChris Smaje<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In 2017, the then Monsanto Chief Technology Officer Robb Fraley argued<\/a> that his company made a mistake in not reaching out to the public about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) when they first appeared on the market in the 1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He felt consumers had been unduly swayed by an anti-GMO movement and the industry got its PR campaign wrong first time around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fraley said the industry and universities currently involved in rolling out genome editing technology have done a much more extensive communication to both the public and key regulatory and policy makers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The industry\u2019s message is that gene editing can precisely delete and insert genes in an organism\u2019s DNA and presents no risks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, there is sufficient research indicating that the technology is error prone<\/a>, the effects of editing are not controllable and there is no simple pathway between gene and trait. Gene editing has unexpected outcomes and risks, and unintended mutations and off-target effects occur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These issues have been noted in various articles, reports and papers which are listed on the GMWatch website<\/a>. Even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Various scientific publications show that new GM techniques allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature. These new GMOs pose similar or greater risks than older-style GMOs<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite gene editing being touted by the industry as \u2018precision breeding\u2019, it is anything but<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to these concerns, researchers<\/a> say that what we can expect is just more of the same \u2013 GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of its new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU\u2019s existing GMO laws. But there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the ECJ decision in 2018, top agribusiness and biotech corporations have spent almost \u20ac37 million lobbying the EU. They have had 182 meetings with European Commissioners, their cabinets and director generals. More than one meeting a week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Little surprise then that the EU Commission\u2019s secret policy scenarios show full GMO deregulation is on the cards<\/a> with the commission considering ending safety checks, traceability and GMO labelling for GM foods, seeds and crops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless of this, is there any need for GMOs in the first place? It seems to be a technology in search of a problem. An important article<\/a> by PC Kesavan and MS Swaminathan in the journal Current Science says there is sufficient evidence to question the efficacy of GM crops in terms of yields, pesticide usage, the effects on farmers and on the environment, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An important article not only because of the evidence it drew upon but also because of the status of both authors, especially that of Swaminathan, considered the father of the Green Revolution in India.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two scientists argue that GM technology is supplementary and must be need-based. In more than 99% of cases, therefore, they say there is no need \u2013 time-honoured conventional breeding is sufficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DYSTOPIAN VISION<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

We need to bear this in mind because there is a disturbing view emerging of a future based on a ecomodernist perspective and a techno-utopia founded on GM crops, lab-engineered \u2018food\u2019 and 90 per cent of humanity being crammed into mega-cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Academics write reports and books on this vision, but among the high-profile foot soldiers promoting it are the likes of The Guardian\u2019s George Monbiot and industry-funded GMO lobbyist Mark Lynas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following forms an ecomodernist vision of the future<\/a> (translated from Dutch) and appears on the RePlanet.nl website:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 2100, the planet is home to around ten billion people. More than 90 per cent of these live and work in the city, compared to 50 per cent in 2000. Around the city are large farms full of genetically modified crops that achieve four times as high a yield as at the beginning of the 21st century.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It goes on to state:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Beyond the farmland begins nature, which now occupies most of the surface of our planet. Whereas in 2000 half of the earth\u2019s surface was still in use by humans, today that is only a quarter. The rest has been returned to nature. Both biodiversity and CO2 emissions are back to pre-1850 levels. Hardly anyone is in extreme poverty anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Those pushing for this transition want large-scale government interventions to help \u2018the market\u2019 achieve the goals set out, including massive government investment in \u201cgame-changing innovations in precision fermentation and biotech\u201d (precision fermentation = lab engineered \u2018food\u2019).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Very much like the type of \u2018stakeholder capitalism\u2019 we hear so much about from the World Economic Forum and like-minded bodies when they discuss the \u2018climate emergency\u2019 and \u2018resetting\u2019 economies and societies in line with market-driven \u2018economic, social and corporate governance\u2019 targets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What this really means is governments becoming junior stakeholders and facilitators, paving the way for private capital to carve up the planet as it sees fit \u2013 imperialism repackaged and rebranded with a veneer of \u2018green\u2019, or in this case \u2013 feeding the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ecomodernists regard their solutions as \u2018progress\u2019 \u2013 as progressive \u2013 as if their vision is the only vision worth considering because it somehow represents the pinnacle of human evolution. Such a view of human development is arrogant, ahistorical and unilinear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If history teaches us one thing, it is that humanity ended up at its current point due to a multitude of struggles and conflicts, the outcomes of which were often in the balance. In other words, as much by chance as design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We need look no further than Robert Brenner (Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe, 1976) and Barrington Moore (Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: lord and peasant in the making of the modern world, 1966) to appreciate this. Their research was based on broad comparative sociological analyses of the cultural, historical, agrarian and economic factors and (class) conflicts that led to the rise of different forms of modernity and social structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their work has important implications: the ecomodernist vision for the future should not be accepted as a given \u2013 as some predetermined fixed endpoint. There are alternative visions, potential outcomes and resistance that can challenge the world these elitists have in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2021, for instance, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems released a report with ETC Group, which set out a very different future for food systems, people and the planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The report asks: what if the initiative is reclaimed by civil society and social movements \u2013 from grassroots organizations to international NGOs, from farmers\u2019 and fishers\u2019 groups to cooperatives and unions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It imagines what a \u2018long food movement\u2019 could achieve by 2045 if these movements succeed in collaborating more closely to transform financial flows, governance structures and food systems from the ground up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ecomodernist vision is ahistorical in another way too. Back in 2015, farmer and writer Chris Smaje\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0that a word you will not find in the ecomodernist vocabulary is inequality. While there are glancing references to poverty, poor people and poor nations, in the ecomodernist vision of modernity, poverty is equated with a lack of modernization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There is no sense that processes of modernization\u00a0cause\u00a0any poverty\u2026 There\u2019s nothing on uneven development, historical cores and peripheries, proletarianization, colonial land appropriation and the implications of all this for social equality. The ecomodernist solution to poverty is simply more modernization.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Smaje also explains<\/a> why the ecomodernist notion that nobody wants to farm, and everybody wants to move to the city meshes neatly with neoliberal ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also argues that alternative visions are not about \u2018oppressing\u2019 people by keeping them in villages and engaging in subsistence farming:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s about choosing policies that best support people\u2019s realistic aspirations \u2013 all people\u2019s, both rural and urban. The EM, and other keystone ecomodernist works like Brand\u2019s Whole Earth Discipline, are conspicuously silent on global economic governance policies. They say nothing about the IMF, the WTO, the free flow of global capital and the constrictions on the flow of global labour.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In other words, if you deliberately run down the farming sector, say via trade policies, and withdraw key extension services that support farmers and do away with guaranteed minimum support prices for crops, then there\u2019s a good chance rural dwellers will flow to cities to live in a slum in the hope of a better life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People do not necessarily \u2018choose\u2019 to move out of farming. They are very often forced out and their land appropriated. We see this in India at this time, where resistance is already fertile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it has to be because the intention by global agricapital and the World Bank is to displace hundreds of millions from the countryside, amalgamate their land and move them into cities. The nation\u2019s agri-food sector is to be restructured for the needs of global supply chains and global agricapital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2016, UN reporter Felix Creutzig<\/a> said Delhi\u2019s population will be 37 million by 2030:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The emerging mega-cities will rely increasingly on industrial-scale agricultural and supermarket chains, crowding out local food chains.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If unchallenged, the outcome will be a country reliant on industrial agriculture and all it entails \u2013 lab engineered items, denutrified food, monolithic diets, the massive use of agrochemicals and food contaminated by hormones, steroids, antibiotics and a range of chemical additives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A cartel of seed, chemical and food manufacturing and processing companies with total control over the food production and supply chain in India and throughout the globe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it will be total. Big global biotech corporations like Bayer and Corteva are extensively patenting plants. Such patents on plants would restrict farmers\u2019 access to seeds and impede breeders from developing new plants as both would have to ask for consent and pay fees to the biotech companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mute Schimpf, food campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe, says of the big biotech giants:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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They will be lining their pockets from farmers and plant breeders, who in turn will have a restricted access to what they can grow and work with.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This is \u2018ecomodernism\u2019 in action. It goes hand-in-hand with elite interests who will rake in enormous profits as they seek to control every aspect of food, farming and, indeed, life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In India, we see various tactics at work to bring this about \u2013 the deliberate strategy to make smallholder farming financially nonviable (depopulating the countryside), attempts to dismantle public distribution systems and minimum support prices, the relentless drive to get GM food crops cultivated, the data-gathering Agristack initiative overseen by Microsoft and the increasing capture of the retail sector by Walmart, Amazon, Facebook and Google (all described in the ebook mentioned at the end of this article).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy<\/a> says the Indian government is trying to establish a system of \u2018conclusive titling\u2019 of all land in the country, so that ownership can be identified and land can then be bought or taken away. As farmers lose access to land or can be identified as legal owners, predatory institutional investors and large agribusinesses will buy up and amalgamate holdings, facilitating the further roll out of industrial agriculture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Agristack (data-gathering) initiative will be key to the formation of a land market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this brave new world, notions of food sovereignty<\/a> and seed sovereignty have no place. A case of you will own nothing, be happy and eat a diet of genetically and biochemically engineered \u2018food\u2019 \u2013 junk food to complement existing junk food<\/a> that claims hundreds of thousands of lives across the globe annually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Food\u2019 courtesy of giant \u2018fermentation\u2019 vats and farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce crops from patented GM seeds for industrial \u2018biomatter\u2019 to be engineered, processed and constituted into something edible. An AI-driven, corporate-controlled \u2018solyent green\u2019 dystopia where the marketplace has been eradicated and a handful of companies and e-commerce platforms control the global economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But resistance is fertile. The farmers\u2019 protest in India led to the repeal of corporate-backed legislation that would have accelerated the trends described above, and, as Vandana Shiva notes, more than 150 community seed banks have been established in the country \u2013 local seeds, adapted to local cultures which provide better nutrition and are more resilient to climate change<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shiva says<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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At the Navdanya Farm<\/a> and Earth University<\/a>, we have trained more than one million farmers who now practice organic agriculture based on biodiversity and without the use of synthetic chemicals. The shift from globalisation driven by multinational corporations to a progressive localisation of our economies has become an ecological and social imperative, essential for food sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

She concludes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cFood sovereignty means feeding ourselves real, genuine, biodiverse food and freeing ourselves from the false promises of artificial food.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Of course, Monbiot, Lynas and the agri-biotech sector are dismissive of the ability of organic agriculture to feed the world and of a world described by Shiva, which rejects corporate dominance and new forms of imperialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their anti-organic, pro-synthetic food stance should be seen for what it is \u2013 fearmongering (the world will starve without GM agriculture) and pro-corporate ideology and an adherence to centralised power, which flies in the face of firm evidence<\/a> that indicates organic supported by an appropriate policy framework is more than capable of addressing the challenges ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colin Todhunter<\/strong> specialises in development, food and agriculture and is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. You can read his \u201cmini e-book\u201d, Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Cultivating Resistance, here<\/a>.<\/h6>\n\n\n\n