BY: Elizabeth Bravo
IEETM
On September 1, 2012, the President of Ecuador called for a debate on the issue of GMOs, especially in reference to the constitutional provision through which the country is declared free of transgenic crops and seeds, and
He did not rule out the possibility of “amending the Constitution” if a scientific conclusion is reached on this matter after a national debate[1].
SENACYT's response was to convene a group of "hardcore" scientists to debate the issue of GMOs, with an audience made up mostly of students of biotechnology or life sciences. Many of the speakers expressed the need for research into GMOs in the country, using arguments such as that we are going to be left out of the train of progress;
that the main scientific journals only publish articles that include tools from molecular biology or on the need to have an “autonomous” science.
From these arguments and this form of consultation, several questions arise, such as the following: Who determines what progress is? Who determines the type of technology that a society needs? Will a type of scientific research that depends entirely on patented and imported inputs and techniques from abroad make us autonomous?
In Ecuador, a plurinational and megadiverse country, there is a great field of work for researchers, where innovative science can be carried out, born in Ecuador and based on our great biodiversity, which without the need to be instrumentalized for the benefit of industry, can be a means to achieve the Sumak Kawsay of the population. Why not think, for example, about obtaining new medicines from Ecuadorian flora? Not for export or to obtain patents (which is a form of privatization of our biodiversity, and which is explicitly prohibited in our constitution[2]), but to solve the health problems that afflict our country. If a scientific publication comes out of that research, good thing, but this cannot be the main motivation.
In addition, obtaining new medicines (even when they are developed with cutting-edge technology) is not the only investment in health that the country needs. Building healthy environments and improving the living and working conditions of the population, to mention just a few aspects, are priorities and needs that have not yet been resolved and which, of course, are not resolved with transgenic technology.
This leads us to ask, who determines the research agenda of universities globally?
Universities are increasingly dependent on private investment, as the withdrawal of the State has facilitated the entry of industry. Now, much of the cutting-edge research is no longer published, as it is protected by trade secrets and confidential information; and what is worse, scientific results can be changed at the request of sponsors. Let us see what British scientist Mae Wan Ho has to say about this (2000).
The Institute of Specialist Professionals and Managers (UK) conducted a survey of scientists working in government or newly privatised laboratories earlier this year. A third of respondents had been asked to change their research output to suit client preference, while 10% were under pressure to duplicate their output to help secure insurance contracts. At a few leading research universities in Britain, reliance on private funding is acute, often amounting to 80-90% of the total research budget. The four unions representing scientists and technical staff have launched a charter, calling for research to be guaranteed “peer review, open publication and autonomy in a significant proportion of the use of resources”. Commercialisation breaks all three principles.
It is increasingly difficult to speak of an independent science.
Questions also arise regarding the consultation methodology, such as: Are molecular biologists the only ones who have something to say on the subject of genetically modified organisms? As this is a technology that affects the whole of society, what can producers, consumers, environmental movements, and society in general tell us?
According to Wynne (2007), although there are different processes of public involvement in decisions about science and technology, what happens in reality is that consultations involve only experts, and topics are discussed that can be understood only by them, even though the decisions taken affect the whole society.
He criticises, for example, the meeting held at the Royal Society of London where a consultation was held on biotechnological agriculture in Europe. Various non-governmental organisations and citizens opposed to GMOs were invited to the process, and were allowed only to ask questions of a selected group of scientists; but they were prohibited from challenging them in the political field on the possible benefits of GM crops, because they were not scientists (Wynne (2007: 103). The scientists who participate in these processes handle areas of knowledge so restricted that they are not able to see in a more comprehensive way the impacts that GM crops can have on peasant agriculture, on poor consumers, on the health of the most vulnerable people, and even on agrobiodiversity.
It is important to ask whether scientists themselves should be called upon to scrutinize the science. It is as if the owner of a company were the one who makes the risk assessment of a project he wants to develop. They are both judge and jury.
On this subject, Funtowicz and Ravetz make very pertinent reflections on how science and technology that entail dangers for society should be evaluated, and they develop the concept of post-normal science, which consists of a methodology for evaluating science that is applied when…
the factors are uncertain, there are disputed values, the risks are high and the decisions are urgent (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 2000).
Major issues such as climate change and the development and adoption of new technologies (such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology and others) must be assessed by an “extended community of peers” made up of all affected actors. They add that
…experts (as a class that includes their own managers) are associated with the causes of disasters and are not always successful in their attempts to ameliorate or mitigate the unexpected or undesired effects of events. The techniques applied in these cases, inherited from the successful experiences of the laboratory-inspired scientific method, are inadequate to varying degrees. Those experts who use them uncritically and then publicly defend them as “scientific” risk undermining the credibility and legitimacy of science. These new “experiments” provide evidence in favor of the thesis that traditional laboratory science must evolve in response to the challenges posed by risks that are occurring on a global scale. The scientific methodology for dealing with these new problems cannot be the same as that which helped create them (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 2000).
In this way, risk assessment is proposed as the methodologies for decision-making on science and technology, which theoretically should be based on scientific information, and those who apply it use the same scientific criteria with which the technology or final product to be evaluated was created or developed[3].
According to Funtowicz and Ravetz (2000), science is given primacy as the leading role of society, and the scientific expert is assumed to be the crucial component in decision-making, both in relation to nature and society.
In the debate on genetically modified organisms that is taking place in Ecuador, this role is assigned to the molecular biologist, ignoring the needs of small and medium producers, the opinion of consumer groups, the risks that transgenic crops may entail for the inhabitants who live in the areas of influence of the crops, etc.[4]
WHO OWNS THE TRUTH?
To analyze this question, I will borrow an illustration made by Esther Díaz (2010) when referring to the film by the Japanese director Akira Kurosowa called “Rashomon”, where an image is presented with a dead man, his horse has disappeared and his hat is on the ground; there is a raped woman. Before an invisible jury (which is the audience), a humble woodcutter says that he found the lifeless man, but that he did not see the woman, nor horses nor weapons. The widow says that she does not know how her husband died and that a stranger raped her. A spirit of the forest says that he was the rapist but not the murderer and the murderer through a medium accuses his wife and the criminal of his death. Who is telling the truth? Is there, in this scene, only one truth?
Truth depends on the perspective from which reality is analyzed. The same happens with positive science. Depending on the experimental model, on the priority given to one variable and not to another - even when a strictly scientific methodology is followed - the results can vary significantly between those found by one researcher and another. And even when these results are similar, the interpretation of the data also depends on the researcher's perspective.
This is an even bigger problem when it comes to solving problems caused by technoscience, which generates a lot of uncertainty because it creates information gaps that can entail dangers for human health or the environment, but which are not addressed correctly because the urgency of getting the product to market prevails.
In many cases, the gaps are filled by mathematical models or simulations in laboratories. However, these uncertainty models are imprecise and rarely applied to real-life conditions. There is also an abuse of statistics. Some scientists say they have proven that something is safe when in fact what they have done is prove that something is not unsafe (at least under the experimental design used). This is the mathematical way of showing that the absence of evidence of risk is the same as evidence of the absence of risk.
For example, if we are evaluating two varieties of corn and even though both are planted in two fields and we have different statistical results, it is probably because the type of soil in each of the soils, the microorganisms present, the climatic fluctuations, the cultural perception that local communities have of each of the varieties and the nutritional value of each one were not studied in detail. If a decision is made only based on statistical data that analyze only the yield of the crops, we can reach wrong conclusions.
THE VOICES OF RASHOMON: SPEECHES IN THE GMO DEBATE IN ECUADOR
In the series of debates that took place in the months of October and November, where researchers from various universities in the country participated, as well as the so-called “Prometheans” foreign or expatriate scientists invited by the Ecuadorian government to work here for a year, and some invited scientists from other countries; a great diversity of versions about transgenic organisms could be noted. As varied as the voices in Rashomon.
I would like to use the example of two Argentine scientists, both professors at the University of Buenos Aires, a country where genetically modified crops already cover more than 23 million hectares.
On the one hand, Dr. Moisés Burachik argued that there is no serious scientific evidence to show that GM crops have had an impact on biodiversity, questioned the precautionary principle[5] and said that it is the fault of environmental organizations that only Monsanto has a monopoly on GM seeds, since they have raised safety standards so high that no small company can produce GM seeds that meet those standards.
On the other hand, Dr. Andrés Carrasco[6] said that the cell nucleus is the most controlled and complex cellular organelle in nature, with an age of 2 billion years. The cell nucleus cannot be manipulated (which is what happens when a transgenic crop is made), without expecting nothing to happen in nature, and he hoped that Ecuador would not follow the same path as Argentina and its massive adoption of transgenic crops.
How can there be two such different perspectives on the same technology? Burachik was a member of the Biotechnology Directorate of the Ministry of Agriculture and of CONABIA[7] and is currently the director of Regulatory Affairs at Bioceres[8]. Carrasco is an embryologist and researcher at CONACET who has conducted studies on the impacts of glyphosate and other herbicides on the embryonic formation of amphibians, with alarming results, and has supported some processes to combat the impacts of glyphosate in his country. These very different responses respond to the life stories of each of the researchers, and to the interests they represent.
Esther Days. The construction of an expanded epistemology. Biblos Publishing House. (Buenos Aires). 167 pp.
Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz. 2001. Postnormal Science: Science with People. 109 pp. Icaria Editorial (Barcelona).
Silvio Funtowicz and Jerry Ravetz, 2000, Political Epistemology: Science with the People. Barcelona: Ediciones Antrazyt.
Ho, Mae Wan and Jonathan Mathews. 2001. New political thinking suppresses dissident science. Institute of Science in Society No. 7/8b
Winne Bryan, 2007. Publishes Participation in Science and Technology: Performing and Obscuring a Political-Conceptual Category Mistake. East Asia Science, Technology and Society: an International Jounal 1:99 – 110.
[2] See for example articles 322, 57.12 and 402.
[3] However, decisions made through the risk assessment methodology include political and economic criteria rather than scientific ones, and are subjective in nature because they include many presumptions based on the evaluator's perception and values.
[4] As has been reported in Argentina, where residents of areas surrounding large soy monocultures are suffering from diseases such as cancer and leukemia at rates several times higher than the national average.
[5] Principle recognized in our constitution and international environmental law that maintains that the lack of conclusive scientific evidence should not be a justification for taking measures to protect human health and nature.
[6] Dr. Andrés Carrasco participated in a forum organized by the IAEN
[7] National Advisory Commission on Agricultural Biotechnology
[8] Investment company focused on the creation, management and financing of companies and projects linked to the development of technologies, products and knowledge in agro-biotechnology.
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