Introduction

Climate change was becoming a more salient issue in the run-up to the 2014 UN Climate Summit and the 2015 Paris COP21. Using the opportunity, an industry–state alliance promoted ‘climate-smart agriculture’, emphasizing capital-intensive inputs such as GM herbicide-tolerant crops for no-till agriculture. Critics denounced this proposal as a ‘false solution’, even as ‘corporate-smart greenwash’. They counterposed agroecology as a truly climate-resilient agriculture. This dispute extended a decades-long conflict over technofixes for endemic harms from the agri-industrial system.

By the 1960s, intensive pesticide usage was inflicting serious environmental harms, especially in North America. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring gained prominence for popularizing the dangers and scientific evidence. Her book denounced pesticides as ‘biocides’ that kill potentially all insects or weeds, thus destroying the basis of life. More fundamentally, her book diagnosed a political-economic driver of the problem, namely: the US's agricultural over-production, a policy to reduce the acreage in production, a financial incentive to maximize yield on the smaller acreage and greater agrichemical usage, thus degrading biodiversity (Carson, 1962: 19).

Widespread protest demanded restrictions or bans on many pesticides, while agrichemical companies denied the dangers. Some eventually devised genomics techniques for a new agribiotech industry, later called the Life Sciences. This promised genetic solutions that would better protect crops and reduce farmers’ dependence on agrichemicals.

What systemic problem was at stake? Plant breeding had traditionally provided some pest resistance through selection from a crop's diverse characteristics. But in the 1970s–1980s the process came ‘under the pesticide umbrella’, relying on pesticides as a basis to prioritize yield, thus weakening intrinsic pest resistance. The greater vulnerability was then portrayed as natural defect which must be corrected by GM techniques. Thus the GM agribiotech fix arose from problems of the previous fix.

The European Community (EC) embraced such potential solutions from the 1980s onwards. When the first agribiotech (GM) products were being marketed in the late 1990s, however, opponents launched a Europe-wide protest campaign. This stigmatized GM products by association with the ‘mad cow’ pandemic, factory farming and its systemic hazards. Diverse groups converged into an effective opposition, eventually blocking a European market for GM products. Critics broadened their target: agribiotech symbolized an unsustainable agri-industrial system.