English Language III

Prof. Gabriela Oñativia

Jimena Ferrario
3 A-2017

GMOs: A controversy

The concerns about GMO1 food are plenty, and the majority of them are
far from paranoid conspiracy theories or reactionary outburst of obscurantism.
Moreover, the voices against transgenic crops are addressing serious
problematics that must be considered urgently if current societies want to enjoy
the advances of science and technology without losing important features that
characterize modern democracies’ functioning. The controversy does not only
lie in the DNA manipulation or the translocation of genes from one specie into a
different one, but mainly in the fact that the advance in the control of the
genetic material of organisms occurs under the supremacy of the technological
paradigm of transnational industries and the lucrative aegis of their commercial
interests. So, when it is claimed that GMO crops are potentially harmful for the
ecosystems’ preservation, the means of living of rural population and the food
sovereignty of many communities around the world, each one of this reasons
needs to be acknowledged seriously.

As regards the adverse effects of GMOs on the preservation of

ecosystems, it is claimed biodiversity is being threatened by multiple factors
that can break with its natural balance. On the one hand, the implementation of
extensive monocultures brings with it high levels of soil depletion and the
contamination of crops that are not GMOs, like wild and organic seeds. On the
other hand, the uncontrolled use of glyphosate leads not only to the extinctions
of many animals, insects and plants because of the permanence of the toxins in
the environment, but also to the mutations of species that in order to adapt to
the new conditions have developed high resistance to pesticides evolving to
superbugs and super weeds. In this way, the previous balance that guaranteed
the survival of an entire ecosystem is destroyed and the extinction of one being
can lead to the extinction of the others.

In which respect to GMOs’ impact on the means of living of rural

population, the main problem emerges from the monopoly that transnationals
detent over the 100% of GMOs seeds’ offer and distribution, and the 60% of the

1 Genetically Modified Organisms

 English Language III
Prof. Gabriela Oñativia
Jimena Ferrario
3 A-2017

seeds in the world. Monsanto, Bayer or Dow, detent property rights over the
seeds, and their successive transformations, during the whole productive
process. By contract, farmers are not allowed to storage or postpone the use of
the seeds for future crops. In this way, people are no longer in possession of
their principal means of production: the seeds. Curiously, the dispossession that
it implies operates at different levels. First, there is the dispossession of the
seed; second, the alienation of the earth and its products; and third, the
dispossession of vernacular knowledge, transmitted from generation to
generation, about how to work the soil, how to administrate and dispose over
their own work in order to produce within a sustainable system.

Finally, food sovereignty, defined as “the right of peoples and sovereign

states to democratically determine their own agricultural and food policies,”2 in
other words, as the peoples’ right to have access not only to food but also to
healthy food connected with the alimentary heritage, integral element of
peoples’ identities, is another issue when it comes about GMOs’ impact on
human practices. In opposition to food sovereignty, GMOs’ biotechnology, a
transnational agribusiness, demands the opposite agricultural order:
transnationals in control of the global production of seeds (and pesticides,)
servile governments, and impoverishment of rural practices and food diversity.
Consequently, food sovereignty and GMOs’ technology are incompatible
realities: the latter implies the destruction of traditional agriculture.

To sum up, by considering the effects of GMOs on the environment

sustainability, the living of rural communities and food sovereignty of the
people, it is even clearer that it is not a matter of taking hostile positions
against the development of science, it is a matter of acknowledging the
background of political and economic forces in which scientific discoveries occur.
The debate on GMOs, is undelayable. It must be open, include all the voices and
had at its centre the factors already mentioned. What seems to be at stake is
not the importance of science in society or the development of regional
economies through the immediate profit that commodities bring, but food

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_sovereignty
 English Language III
Prof. Gabriela Oñativia
Jimena Ferrario
3 A-2017

availability, food quality, and the sustainability of the resources that guarantee
the persistence of the human kind on this planet.

Jimena Ferrario