What stood out most to me in the article were the different levels of mistrust coupled with mis-information. The citizens distrusted the corporations, who typically put profit before ethics, the citizens distrusted the scientists, who may or may not have been paid off why the corporations to endorse GMOS, the scientists distrusted the politicians, who did not acknowledge the empirical evidence about the safety of GMOs, and the circle goes on. This distrust of government, science and corporations is present throughout American society, from pharmaceuticals, to health care acts, it was only natural that people distrusted GMOs. Despite scientists demonstrating the evidence, public opinion often seems to outweigh this.
If a person is firm and unwavering in their beliefs, even if the belief lacks logic or solid evidence, it is extremely impossible to shake this person of this belief, even if you spell out every possible piece of evidence.
One commenter on the article said, “Science is pure. Scientists are not.” (See: Guatemalans Infected by STDs, Tuskegee Experiments, Stanford Prison Experiment)
Throughout recent times as technology has developed, ethical problems have arised alongside it. For example, scientists may know that a medicine may pose some threat to consumers, however it is often in the interest of pharmaceutical companies to downplay this in order to make profits. These scientists face an ethical dilemma as they must chose between alerting the public to this health risk or to stay in the good graces of the pharmaceutical industry. These types of situations influence public hesitance to support scientists that fought for GMOs because it is impossible to know which scientists were being paid off by GMO stakeholders. Additionally, other powerful industries benefitted from bans of GMOs, such as the organic industry.
The amount of stakeholders on each side further made the public confused as to whether groups were pro- or anti-GMO due to the opportunity of monetary gains or competition in the industry.
With GMOs, this public opinion played an integral role in the ban attempts, pushes for companies to label products with GMOs, and the now negative connotation that GMOs has. Unfortunately this came at the cost of some positive things that GMO usage could have such as, growing food to prevent world hunger or stabilizing food systems in countries in need.
Practices within the food system in the US are highly questionable, with massive animal feed lots, high usage of dangerous pesticides and little longitudinal research done to determine the long-term impact of these practices. Unfortunately in the GMO debate, the lack of awareness of the presences of long-term research further hurt the pro-GMO campaign. Additionally, the desires of consumers for non-GMO foods conflict with their demand for large amounts of all types of foods. These conflicting desires mean that GMOs may be necessary to produce reliable and near-constantly available amounts of produce, for example, the Hawaiian grown papayas would have died off without the use of GMOs to destabilize the crop population.
As American consumers, the system of capitalism is deeply ingrained in us.
We want the best quality products, at the lowest prices, available as soon as possible (hence the boom of Amazon Prime). Yet, there is always a cost to these demands, whether it be factory workers who labor in disgusting conditions to make our skinny jeans and leggings, or the miners who die daily to extract the earth metals in our iPhones, or the bananas that we NEED for our daily kale smoothies that had to be genetically modified to prevent mutations.
The fight over GMOs speaks to our capitalist culture, fears of science, distrust of corporations and big government, and realization that aspects of our food system are not ideal.