| This is a study of the emergence, and implications, of the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, in the context of the global politics of agricultural biotechnology (agbiotech) and the environment. A secondary focus is Canada's role in negotiating this international agreement governing trade in (living) genetically-engineered organisms (CEOs), and the protocol's implications for the Canadian politics of agbiotech. This analysis is guided by a theoretical framework that integrates elements of neo-institutionalism (on international "regimes") with insights from the works of Gramsci (on "hegemony," "ideology," "historical blocs," and "organic intellectuals") and Foucault (on "discourse," "governmentality," and "biopower"). This integrated approach frames politics in terms of three levels of relations of force: the material, organisational/institutional, and ideational. Methodologically, this study is based on an analysis of negotiating texts, first-person accounts (including "elite" interviews), and secondary sources. What I term here the "biotech bloc" is a constellation of forces that has, at its nexus, transnational agri-chemical corporations, the agricultural research establishment, and regulatory arms of government in the United States, Canada, and Argentina. In the 1980s, this historical bloc embraced a particular set of ideas about both the "equivalence" (regarding risk assessment) and the "uniqueness" (regarding proprietary issues) of GEOs contra non-GEOs, in order to initiate a global agbiotech revolution. However, in the late 1990s, evidence from the Cartagena Protocol negotiations demonstrates that the biotech bloc was forced to make major concessions to political actors who held a more critical view of GEOs. These conoessions were enabled through the emergence, and entrenchment, of a "precautionary discourse" in the field of agbiotech, both outside and within the Cartagena Protocol negotiations. This precautionary discourse has slowed the agbiotech revolution, and will likely lead to more careful assessments of the risks of GEOs, even in a country at the heart of the biotech revolution like Canada. At the same time, this discourse has also disciplined the critics of genetic engineering, by continuing to exclude many of their ethical, social, and economic critiques from regulatory assessment. |
