“Why Stop the New GMOs” it’s our newly released book for the editor Terra Nuova on an issue that is as huge as it is hidden from mass communication. We decided to write it because we believe that people should have the means of knowledge necessary to take action. After publishing dossiers, articles, organizing campaigns and debates, the time has therefore come to take an extra step to investigate the issue: our book on new GMOs comes when we are just one step away from the possible deregulation of a wave of new genetically modified organisms in Europe, which could change agriculture and the food we eat forever.
Until now, traceability, labeling and risk assessment requirements based on the precautionary principle have prevented the invasion of genetically engineered daughter crops and lab-created foods. Now, however, the European Commission wants to remove all restrictions on so-called New Genomic Techniques (NGT), renamed Tecniche di Evoluzione Assistita (TEA) in Italy, including the possibility for states to ban them on their territory.
Why Stop the New GMOs weaves together the history of biology, journalistic investigation and movement testimony to tell the story of the enormous interests and dangerous relationships between multinational corporations, politicians and scientists that threaten to undermine a genuine agro-ecological transition, farmers’ rights to seeds and consumers’ right to informed choice.
What’s in the book
After the failure of the first generation of GMOs, recounted in the first chapter, attempts are now being made to update the narrative by promising new GMOs that are “indistinguishable” from the products of peasant agriculture, in order to put them on our tables without any more risk assessment, traceability or labeling, which are now required by law.
The second chapter dismantles every piece of this big lie, which aims to raze the precautionary principle to the ground and fully realize the dream of multinational corporations, complicit governments and biotechnologists seeking glory and funding.
The third chapter is devoted to recounting the evolution that the life sciences are undergoing in an attempt to extend their domination over food systems, declaring equality between nature and technology, between biotechnology and agroecology, according to a philosophy of indistinction that has been wrested from social movements and reinterpreted in an extractive key.
A “holy alliance”, that between science and capital, which we see expressed plastically in the patent system, the pillar around which the possible deregulation of the new GMOs revolves.
The fourth and fifth chapters analyze the history, philosophy and ways in which patenting enables the appropriation and privatization of agricultural biodiversity and food. The strategy aims to bring farmers under the influence of a seed industry that, in order to maintain its continued expansion, has no qualms about unloading on them.
What to do, then, in the face of this silent monster that turns every form of life into a commodity, bites into every space of autonomy, and spits the dross in our faces?
In the sixth and last chapter, we describe the paths that lead to emancipatory directions, on the front of practices and on the front of political struggle. We open a window on the agroecological practices of peasants on five continents and their struggle for a coherent global regulatory framework aimed at affirming the collective rights to conserve, reuse, exchange and sell their seeds and to oppose the patenting of the living.