Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology

1. Cultural Landscapes

monsanto meets mary douglas August 26, 2001, was a sunny and warm day in southern France. Shortly after noon, a group of men and women began to convene on a small plot of land near the rural town of Auch, a region well known for its culinary delights and picturesque beauty. A distinctly festive atmosphere prevailed. Many arrived on the scene with picnic baskets brimming with Roquefort cheese, foie gras, potted duck, and other regional specialties. To look at the smiling faces in the crowd, one would think it was a belated Bastille Day celebration, rather than the inauguration of a clandestine operation that by the end of the day would render all participants guilty of “trespassing, property destruction, and theft” (Ford 2001). When the assembly reached approximately 150 strong, the small contingent got to work. Armed with scythes, machetes, scissors, and pruning hooks, the group set about razing a plot of genetically modified maize. Within five minutes, the eightysquare -yard plot of corn had been felled, leaving behind nothing but rows of stalks. The protestors then piled the offending crop into the trunks of their cars before driving to the nearby site of Cleon d’Andran, where they cut down another field of experimental corn while police officers watched from the sidelines (Mallet 2001). What took place on that warm summer day was not the first—or the last—attack on French soil directed against the expanding use of genetic en2 0 one Cultural Landscapes gineering in agriculture. In 1997, a group of protestors in Nerac, also in southern France, demolished a stock of genetically modified corn seed belonging to the Swiss multinational Novataris AG (Egan 2003; Sciclino 2002). Two years later, protestors razed genetically altered rice plants and related research facilities at Cirad, an internationally funded agricultural research institute attached to Montpellier University (Graham 2001; Sciclino 2002). The driving force behind these and similar campaigns has been the Confederation Paysanne (CP), a militant French farmers’ organization first formed in 1987. Led by José Bove, a Parisian intellectual turned activist farmer (Klee 1999), the Confederation Paysanne is seeking to obliterate all genetic crop experiments in France and to protest what it sees as the growing imperialism of multinational biotech companies (Godoy 2003).1 For his efforts in masterminding these and other demonstrations, Bove was sentenced to ten months in jail, but he served only five weeks. He emerged from imprisonment as one of France’s most popular heroes and within days appeared onstage in front of two hundred thousand supporters, where he once again spoke out against what he called “the seeds of death” (Henley 2003).2 “The judge did us a great service by throwing me in jail,” Bove said. “We couldn’t have asked for better publicity” (quoted in Sancton 1999). Since genetically modified organisms (GMOs) first appeared on the scene in the early 1990s, their use has created a storm of controversy. Recent developments in science and technology have made it possible for genes to be transferred from one species to another, either by inserting them directly into the cells of a recipient organism, or by infecting cells with them using an altered virus or synthetic vector. The tools needed to achieve these transfers of genes have been available since the advent of recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology in the 1980s. This technology splices a gene from one organism into a piece of DNA from a virus or some other small object, and then uses that object to bring the new genetic material to a desired chromosome , often the chromosome of another species (Carlson 2001). In this manner, genes from bacteria (in particular, Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt) have been transferred to plants, including corn and cotton, to protect them from a variety of pests.3 Similarly, genes can be moved between human beings and fish or between animals and vegetables, depending on the desired objective of the transfer (Mulugu 1998). The first plant food derived from a genetically modified crop to be sold in North America was the FlavrSavr tomato. It was introduced in 1994 and carried a gene that reduced the production of the fruit’s ripening enzyme, c u lt u r a l l a n d s c a p e s 2 1 c u lt u r a l l a n d s c a p e s 2 2 thereby extending its shelf...