By Anthony Gregory
Greg Conko has a thoughtful critique of Carolyn Moffa’s featured article on GMO corporatism.
Now, I actually have sympathies to critiques of both sides of the GMO debate, but the real issue here is the problem with government being involved in agriculture. Conko somewhat is lefitimately concerned that anti-GMO rhetoric could “at the very least provide aid and comfort to[] more government intervention.” I don’t believe Moffa’s article calls for the statism explicitly, and Conko doesn’t seem to say so either. But this might be a concern.
However, this is a concern of all critiques of any social conditions brought about by state intervention in the first place. If you criticize the effect of mass immigration and spurred by distortions in the labor markets and by welfare, does that mean you’re necessarily calling for national ID cards? If you complain that a favored industry gets kickbacks from the state, are you necessarily defending Antitrust? If you criticize a foreign regime getting U.S. taxdollars to conduct atrocities (like Saddam in the 1980s) is this in any sense a call for war against that regime to remedy it?
The main thrust of a proper critique of GMOs is they are more pervasive than they should be, and dangerous, because of government intervention. Moffa was blaming the corporate state, its subsidies and patents, for bringing about a situation whereby many Americans might be eating stuff they wouldn’t in a free market. I believe personally in a free market that food would be much more traditional and less “engineered” than it is, for a variety of reasons. I also believe that students would score better on standardized tests in a freer society. That is not a call for No Child Left Behind.
In other words, the way to reconcile the interests of all producers and consumers is not by adding any layers of intervention — whether it be labeling requirements, as some might think the anti-GMO folks are necessarily calling for, or stronger patent protections that override common sense and often victimize farmers who want nothing to do with GMOs, as the pro-GMO folks are sometimes thought to be advocating — is freedom itself, a complete separation of agriculture and state. I find valuable insights on both sides of the food debate within the freedom movement, but admit it is beyond my expertise to say which side is absolutely right or wrong on some of the more esoteric facts. Until free markets are restored, these conflicts are just as inevitable, even among pro-freedom folks, as would be religious conflicts in a country with only one legal and official religion. Food is an intimate area of every one’s life, and I tend to think Americans are being swept away into an industrialized revolution in agriculture faster than they are ready for, and certainly faster than the market would bear on its own. I also believe world hunger is a real problem and people in any event have a right to eat what they want, whether it be organic veggies or “frankenfoods,” without either the Nanny State or corporate state discouraging or encouraging anything.
Before we have a free market in food, all our choices are being infringed and constrained by the government, with threats to liberty shrouded behind the rhetoric of both sides on this debate. But in a free society, the stakes would be much lower as people could eat what they want, and a more informed consumer base would almost surely exist. Until we get there, I plead with pro-freedom folks of all diets and impulses regarding food to unite primarily against the state that divides us, the state that props up Big Ag while banning transfats, the state that entrenches Monsanto while threatening to prevent the poor from the benefits of agricultural miracles, the state that has managed to turn free-markets against each other by becoming so intertwined in farming. Our goal should be the separation of food and state, and, secondarily to that, people can demonstrate the problems with statist solutions running in either direction while encouraging their fellow humans to eat economically and healthy.
We can disagree on what’s best to put on our own bodies, but I would like the pro-GMO and anti-GMO folks to agree that the state is the problem and everything it does in the realm of food production, distribution and consumption—everything—must be abolished, to break bread on this issue, even if they eat from different loaves.