Imagine a future where no farmer in the world can grow a crop without paying exorbitant royalties to a multinational corporation. Discover magazine doesn't seem to think there's anything wrong with that future. Like other science media that seem to embrace genetic engineering as “real scientific breakthrough” and view those opposing it as scientific neanderthals, Discover is in fact ignoring the facts and the science around this technology.
After recently reading an article on
GMOs in the magazine it was obvious to me how delicately the author
danced around the science on GMO crops, cherry-picking the
information he wanted to convey and doing his best to paint European
anti-GMO activists as science deniers. Like most media I see
supporting biotechnology, there is a concerted effort to misdirect
the argument towards the scientific and away from the political. In
fact, they try hard to make the point that the political is trumping
the scientific. But sometimes the political is more important than
the scientific because there are real issues at stake.
Discover says that “As transgenic
crops have spread around the world without the apocalyptic
consequences activists initially foretold, objections to the
technology have shifted away from science.” In other words they
couldn't stop GMOs with a scientific argument, so now they are
resorting to simple politics. But why this would happen is never
fully explained or justified. That maybe these activists are
different from the ones who initially brought up the health and
safety concerns about GMOs (a very real statistical possibility) is
never explored. Maybe this issue has always been part of the case
against transgenic crops, or maybe early activists could not have
envisioned the greater designs of biotech companies (control of the
world's food systems) when they began their fight against GM crops
with real fears about the unknown.
