Opposition to transgenic technologies: ideology, interests and collective action frames.

Genetic engineering has enabled significant, accepted innovations in medicine and other fields. In agriculture, however, a global cognitive divide around 'genetically modified organisms' (GMOs) has limited the diffusion and scope of this technology. The framing of agricultural products of recombinant DNA technology as GMOs lacks biological coherence, but has proved to be a powerful frame for opposition. Disaggregating the concept of the 'GMO' is a necessary condition for confronting misconceptions that constrain the use of biotechnology in addressing imperatives of development and escalating challenges from nature, especially in less-industrialized nations.

On risk and regulation: Bt crops in India.

Genetic engineering in agriculture raises contentious politics unknown in other applications of molecular technology. Controversy originated and persists for inter-related reasons; these are not primarily, as frequently assumed, differences over scientific findings, but rather about the relationship of science to 'risk.' First, there are inevitably differences in how to interpret 'risk' in situations in which there are no established findings of specific hazard; 'Knightian uncertainty' defines this condition. Science claims no method of resolution in such cases of uncertainty. Second, science has no claim about risk preferences in a normative sense. In genetic engineering, Knightian uncertainty is pervasive; declaring uncertainty to constitute 'risk' enables a precautionary politics in which no conceivable evidence from science can confirm absence of risk. This is the logic of the precautionary state. The logic of the developmental state is quite different: uncertainty is treated as an inevitable component of change, and therefore a logic of acceptable uncertainty, parallel to acceptable risk of the sort deployed in cost-benefit analysis in other spheres of behavior, dominates policy. India's official position on agricultural biotechnology has been promotional, as expected from a developmental state, but regulation of Bt crops has rested in a section of the state operating more on precautionary than developmental logic. As a result, notwithstanding the developmental success of Bt cotton, Bt brinjal [eggplant, aubergine] encountered a moratorium on deployment despite approval by the regulatory scientific body designated to assess biosafety.

Epistemic brokerage in the bio-property narrative: contributions to explaining opposition to transgenic technologies in agriculture.

Unlike some global contentions - abolition of slavery, or universal franchise, for example - the rift over rDNA crops is not about ultimate values. Improvement of farmer welfare and enhanced sustainability of agriculture are universally valued goals. However, means to those ends are politically disputed; that dispute depends on alternative empirical stories about biotechnology, sometimes even alternative epistemologies. Opposition revolves around two fundamental dimensions: bio-safety and bio-property. There is convergence of these dimensions around exceptional risk and vulnerability to corporate control of farmers, but these are analytically separable questions of fact. This paper concentrates on bio-property. Epistemic brokers have successfully established knowledge claims that simultaneously undermine the case for rDNA technologies as potential contributors to development and motivate opposition. Epistemic brokers command authority from their positions at junctures of networks, enabling the screening, weighting, theorizing and diffusion of contentious empirical accounts. In contentions of low information, high information costs and diffuse anxiety, these claims provide cognitive support for opposition to 'GMOs'. Specifically, claims of patents, monopoly corporate control and terminator technology have diffused to and from India in global networks. Though effective in transnational advocacy networks, these claims have proved either false or inconsistent with dynamics on the ground.