Contributing to the Web of Life?
An ethics of food biotechnology
by Jeff Golliher

How should the church respond to information passed on by the Union of Concerned Scientists that in supermarkets today, corn tortilla chips may contain genetic material from fireflies, that potato chips may contain material from chicken, apple juice from silk moths, or veggie burgers from petunias? Without claiming specialized scientific expertise, is there a basis on which the church should be concerned? The answer is yes.

A hunger -- and ecological -- crisis

With the introduction of biogenetically modified crops into the global food system, a great deal is at stake for every living being, especially for the 800 million malnourished people who go hungry every day. Projected rates of future population growth will make this tragic figure even more severe. Increased food production and more efficient, cost-effective agricultural practices might be partial solutions to the worldwide hunger crisis. This is especially so in marginal areas where the land has been degraded and monetary and technological resources available for irrigation are scarce. In a technological extension of the Green Revolution of the 1970s, corporate promoters of genetically modified foods have made feeding the world their goal. This claim ignores the fact that today enough food is produced already to meet everyone's needs, at least minimally. So, it's not basically a question of quantity. Solutions to the food crisis are rooted as much in distributing existing food supplies equitably as they are in producing more crops.

The fact that equitable distribution is largely ignored while the genetic modification of plant crops is actively pursued points to less altruistic factors at work in agribusiness -- the control of global markets in order to maximize profits. Public relations campaigns that proclaim the corporate mission of feeding the world, designed to ease the public's mind about the safety of genetically modified foods, divert attention from the deeper ecological issues involved and delay real solutions to the problem. For example, developing nations desperately need agricultural systems that are locally self-sufficient, rather than dependent on global agribusiness. Even if adequate land, water, energy and technological resources exist to support the development of large-scale agriculture, the consumers themselves would not have enough money to buy the food it promises. To make matters worse, people often do not have access to the land they need to support sustainable livelihoods, while the land itself is under the severe pressure of environmental degradation. As churches and governments grapple with difficult ethical decisions about the use of genetically modified foods in the years ahead, we must consider the primary ecological picture on which agriculture depends. The impoverishment of people is directly related to the impoverishment of the earth. In actuality, the food crisis is part of the ecological crisis, and the way the debate about genetic engineering takes place turns our attention from this most fundamental reality of our time.

The depth of the ecological crisis goes beyond our customary ways of thinking, and this has contributed to the making of the crisis itself. While ecology, a science of living systems, is relatively new, it provides a broad, holistic perspective on the earth as a web of life. The science of ecology and the ecological crisis challenge what we know and how we know it -- about the relationship between facts and values, science and religion; about morality, justice and conscience, as well as non-violence and prayer, as ways of knowing and being. Issues of food and new biogenetic technologies cannot be adequately understood through the lens of a divided worldview -- one that sees ecology and people as somehow different, separable areas of life.

The precautionary principle, food security and food safety

The debate about the testing, regulation and labeling of genetically modified foods is shaped primarily by the precautionary principle. The meaning of this principle is best understood in light of the Hippocratic oath which says, "First, do no harm." This is a good ethical standard related, I believe, to the principle of non-violence that has deep roots in spiritual traditions. The legal defense of basic human rights and consumer protection often depends on the precautionary principle and, for that reason, it should be affirmed and strengthened.

However, given the state of the global ecological crisis, the precautionary principle alone is not enough. We must also ask what contribution genetically modified foods and the industry that produces them are making to the web of life. Given the state of the planet, if we're not making things better, then we are probably making things worse.

Together with the precautionary principle, "food security" and "food safety" are two major concerns behind ongoing debates about the labeling of genetically modified foods. "Food security" refers to the goal of providing nutritious food for everyone, especially people who are hungry.

From a scientific standpoint, a food is considered safe if it does not violate the genetic integrity of organisms and ecosystems with regard to the flow of genetic information. A naturally occurring plant would resist genetic material from other biological species, for example, but not from plants of its own species. Biologically safe foods would not threaten food security in the ecological sense -- the integrity of the food supply or of ecosystems that support it would not be compromised. So the crucial question is this: Could the modified genetic material of a plant "escape" into the larger ecosystems, and if so, would it be harmful? These are questions for which the scientific and agribusiness communities do not have assuring answers.

The claim that genetically modified foods are biologically safe is potentially misleading: Those foods are already the result of the compromised integrity of genetic material. Certainly, the assumption that they are safe is based on a contradiction, at least in our conventional use of language. The most obvious case here, which was discussed by Michael Pollan in The New York Times, is the New Leaf potato which includes the Bt gene as a pesticide. Is it a potato or a pesticide or both?

Owning life?

The genetic material of nature has been the common heritage of human civilization for 10,000 or more years, and the different ways that cultures have understood, classified, and used the web of life for survival is the most fundamental kind of sacred knowledge. The moral significance of patenting and "owning" forms of life are monumental issues here. Equally important is the issue of simply being able to know the names of plants and animals, their characteristics and properties, and how they interact in ecosystems. Human engineering along these lines is not something that amounts to a technological discovery alone; it reaches into the sacred itself. The precise moment in human history when we would most want people to reawaken their appreciation of the natural diversity which is the web of life is definitely not the time to introduce more hubris in our attempt to remake it.

The genetic modification of food, as well as new biotechnologies generally, has carried the marketplace at a pace far beyond the reach of effective governance, which in minimal, practical terms means regulation and labeling. But this is not really the major issue. Genetically modified food represents a development within our culture that still degrades and even destroys the web of life of which we are all a part. It will make little difference that regulatory principles and food labels issue the proper warning if the institutions driving the system are taking us in the wrong direction.

Think of it in terms of the increasing dependence of farmers on seeds owned and patented by global corporations. This amounts to the consolidation of power on the basis of genetic information within the seed itself. Increased pressure on indigenous, traditional and rural people toward industrial, monocultural production, and dependence on the corporations that govern it, means the loss of the cultural knowledge we need the most: the knowledge of biodiversity conservation by the people who practice it and know first-hand how local ecosystems work. The kind of knowledge most highly valued by the industrial system is knowledge of large-scale production. This has the unintended impact of destroying biodiversity and subsuming small-scale farmers and traditional communities into the market system. Marginalized peoples often do want this new knowledge; it might and sometimes does really help in the short-term, but they, like everyone else, are still caught within the same overall dynamic of choosing a course of action that leads in a destructive direction in the long-term.

It is, no doubt, very difficult for lawmakers to conceive of effective governance and regulation when the cultural and economic processes involved relate primarily to the maximization of profits and the control of a planetary marketplace.

Sacred knowledge

Some of the most basic questions about the relationship between people and the environment, stewardship and caring for the earth are at stake here -- questions that the church has recently rediscovered in the last 20 years or so. The fact that here we are talking about a new technology as it relates to the food system makes the ecological significance of these questions all the more pertinent, because it is through food that we survive, and even more so, it is how God cares for us through the web of life.

All this leads us in the direction of radically reconsidering what sacred knowledge actually is. In the broad sweep of history, at least until the modern era, human knowledge has been holistically integrated to the extent that its overall purpose has been to maintain the web of ecological relationships that make human life possible and meaningful.

It is interesting and very revealing about the state of our ethical sensitivity, collectively, that only in the last 10 years, some scientists have engaged in a very serious debate about whether traditional indigenous peoples actually have ecological knowledge. Much of the debate has been tragically distorted by stereotypic examples of indigenous peoples who may not respect the environment. Nevertheless, the debate as a whole has been equally distorted by racist images equivalent to the 19th-century, pseudo-evolutionary view that so-called "primitive" peoples do not have true religion. Terms such as paganism, animism, and so on were coined by the leading intellectuals of the time to categorize so-called "primitive peoples" as something less than spiritual. It was all part of the political and economic machinery of racism. Not much has changed, except today this political and economic machinery is being carried out in terms of science, food and ecological knowledge. Who really knows about ecosystems and how they work? Do we? By their fruits, you shall know them. But more to the point: Who really has the knowledge to feed people sustainably?

Traditional peoples do; organic farmers do. And the fact is that large, global corporations have the resources to do things on a very large scale. A coming together of the two, based on economically just partnerships, would be a really good idea. It would mean setting aside implicitly racist colonial attitudes and recognizing that the ecological crisis is real for everyone. For the church, this means deepening our faith in God by affirming and acting on loyalty not to economic institutions as our first impulse, but to the web of life.

Jeff Golliher is Canon for Environmental Justice and Community Development at New York's Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and Program Consultant for the Environment with the Anglican Observer to the United Nations. This piece is adapted from a paper Golliher presented at the January 2001 conference on Genetic Engineering and Food for the World sponsored by the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and the Episcopal Church's Committee on Faith Ethics, Science and Technology.