GMO Project Laid to Rest

As a coordinator for the EMC2 program this year, I was given four students to guide, advise, and assist. Unfortunately, one of my students, Shika, has decided that her obligations are too demanding to meet all of them. She has decided that she will no longer be participating in EMC2, freeing up some time to satisfy more urgent tasks before her. I bear her no ill will, and I wish her well in all of her other endeavors. Learning how to say no to too much work is a lesson that took me many years, and much misery, to learn. I respect that she seems to have already learned it.

Of course, that leaves a project unfinished. Now, one could say that no project is truly finished. Not in research, anyway. I’ve never known an intellectual to stand back from their writing and lab results and notes and say that there was nothing more to be done. However, there are natural points of demarcation, where projects may be laid to rest if necessary. Shika’s project, I believe, had not yet reached such a demarcation, and that leaves me a little sad. I’ve decided to briefly bring her project to a point where it can, in fact, be laid to rest, as a tribute to the work that she has already done.

Shika was studying GMOs. Apparently, it was a topic that had interested her for a long time (she posted an essay to her website that she wrote some years ago in which she called for the banning of GMOs). By the time she started her project this year, she had grown to the point where she no longer believed that GMOs should be banned (after all, we have people to feed), but she did believe that they should be labelled so that people could make informed choices in the market. So, her project was going to focus on reasons for labelling GMOs, and perhaps with a call to action. As she began to research, though, she became interested in the backstory of GMOs, the drama that comes before the product gets to the store shelves. She became interested in the history of Monsanto and its contracts with farmers who use its seeds and its legislative power. She became concerned with the plight of these farmers, who weren’t understanding what they were agreeing to or else were deceived about their future of growing GMO crops. She became angry with the monopolistic nature of the big GMO seed manufacturers. 

At the time that Shika left the program, she had not yet realized that her project needed to shift from labelling and spend some time on learning market structure and business ethics. But I knew it. Labelling is a surface-level issue, something that everyone talks about. Dig a little deeper, and you start to find all the other interesting aspects of a subject like GMOs. She wasn’t gonna stick with labelling for long (after my prodding), even though that was her ultimate motivation. And, indeed, I was gonna bring her back to it after some proper research on the other aspects.

How do companies come to dominate an industry? There are, essentially, just two ways. The first way, the political way, is to get the government to enact a bunch of regulations that your competitors can’t afford to comply with or perhaps have the government grant you an outright monopoly. The second way, the economic way, is to serve the consumers better than your competitors, and thereby drive them out of the market. There’s nothing inherently bad about dominating an industry, about having market power. In a free market, whatever power a business has ultimately comes from the consumers. The consumer is king in a free market economy. So, there’s nothing inherently bad about Monsanto having market power if the consumers have willed it to be so.

However, it is entirely possible that Monsanto may be using its market power to do horrendous things in the production of its product, including bankrupting poor farmers or locking them into a never-ending debt cycle. If the problem with Monsanto is its industry practices, and not its product (although Shika believed that GMOs could cause some health issues for a few people), then that’s the problem that we should be focusing on. And how do we solve this problem? By appealing to a higher power, of course. The first instinct of a student today would be to appeal to the government, to get the FTC to classify Monsanto as a monopoly, or a human rights bureau to condemn its practices, and begin to crack down on its practices through regulation. 

But I think that there’s a much more elegant solution, one that ties Shika’s project together nicely. Appeal to the consumers. That is, tell consumers what Monsanto is doing, and then let them determine the punishment, let them determine whether Monsanto can continue its abuses. And, of course, the way to do this would be to start labelling GMO products. At the end of the year, after studying in-depth the GMO market structure and the abuses it involves, Shika could have presented her findings and made an argument for GMO labelling based not on the boring assertion that consumers should know what they’re buying, but that consumers should know who they’re buying from. Much more interesting.

This is the direction that I believe Shika’s project was heading, given her interests and my influence. Perhaps she’ll return to it someday; I think the result would be magnificent. But, at least we’ve sketched out the path that was before her, a hypothetical EMC2 project that can, for now, be laid to rest.  Thank you, Shika, for your thought-provoking research and questions.