GMO-TEA: the attack on the living continues
Costantino Ragusa – Resistenze al nanomondo (www.resistenzealnanomondo.org)

That genetically modified organisms in agriculture were anything but stationary we have known for some time. Precisely from the language that often united the promoters of the engineering of living things and their detractors. What united them and often made them indistinguishable was, and still is, the trust in science with its research, which we know is currently almost entirely directed in a certain way, not because of a mistake in the road, but because of what is now its essence in perfect harmony with modern times that do not provide for any doubts as to the path to follow. It has been several decades that the so-called debate, let us use a word that is immediately comprehensible because it would be difficult to describe what has happened, has revolved around the method used, the possible harmfulness, sometimes on the timescales that are too fast or too long, but never that an ethical reflection has been posed, even if we reluctantly use this word in view of what has been put in place over the years with the approval of the ethics committees themselves, which have always skilfully manoeuvred between complicit silences and shameless consensus, where it was needed to preserve a relic of humanism that has now become technocratic. So addressing the issue from a point of view that starts from aspects that are not strictly technical, but rather more philosophical and social in terms of where one wants to go and whether that kind of direction is really free of irreversible consequences with regard to nature and its consequent plundering of resources, respect for other animals, and whether the much-declared freedoms of human beings are actually respected. No one is questioning the most fundamental issues, the ones that first and foremost deserve all the necessary commitment and attention. Rather, these years of no debate on genetic engineering have witnessed a preparatory soaking towards better times in which everyone has participated, technocrats and critics alike. What else is the so-called precautionary method if not waiting inside laboratories for better times? The field trial of the new GMOs – TEA answered this question. A dialogue between respectable gentlemen who do not share the same ideas, but who, coming from the same cultural environment and tradition, nurture great mutual respect and prepare a framework that can accommodate the same positions that are at first seemingly irreconcilable, but later always find themselves in the same bed because the same universe of meaning is shared.
This is what has happened between opponents and supporters of GMOs over the last twenty years. In the beginning, as we know, there were the multinationals that took the field with all their arrogance, for example Monsanto pulling the strings of all the various companies, strong in their economic power and thus in the corruption of regulatory bodies such as the American FDA to name the best known and later the EFSA in Parma for Europe. In the meantime these companies stumbled into a few small local trials where they were found guilty. Monsanto could have been called a hardened criminal for the lawsuits brought against it. The disbursement of a few pennies made it possible in the time, never too quick, of the arrival of the final judgement to make billions again with the same practice, in this sense the PCB case teaches. All this led to very important international mobilisations, such as in India where GMOs in the fields, from cotton to the various attempts to engineer even rice, was not a matter for the conscious consumer at the supermarket, but was a matter of life and death, and very often the farmers chose precisely this second option by ingesting as an extreme act of protest the well-known Glyphosate produced by Monsanto itself.
So we had these GMOs that had become for a small part of the world the symbol of American imperialism, with all the world represented by it including that ever-present exoticism of the struggle that leads one to be radical with the enterprises of others, better if distant geographically. In Europe, there were not a few complaints about this genetic technology, which started out decidedly badly in the imagination of the general public. Then, too, there was the vast array of rhetoric deployed to make the innovation accepted as saving poor countries in the South, reducing the use of pesticides, and, of course, increasing productivity. The propaganda sometimes went perhaps a little too far, a child of the old slogans of the Green Revolution of the 1960s where ‘miracle seeds’ were the stars. Again, it was promised that they would work miracles with genetic modifications in living organisms. Some images became the symbol of the so-called Frankenstein food, such as the famous tomato with a fishbone inside: a tomato with fish genes inside in order to keep longer. The promise of miracles was not very successful and rather frightened because, according to the researchers, that ‘irrationality’ towards scientific progress and in general towards what is not known has taken over. After all, even the scientists, although they acted rationally, indeed the only repositories of true rationality, had no idea where they were going and had to put their transgenic chimeras back in the hothouses early on to await better times. In fact, it was obvious to any survey that the image of GMOs in food and agriculture at least in Europe was ruined, and it was difficult to remedy this situation unless it was immediately clear that we were dealing with GMOs. In the feed of animals destined for industrial animal husbandry in Italy, GMO feed, grains and flours have been present for many years, so those who feed other animals have also been consuming elements of genetically modified origin and, as we have said elsewhere, these grains often also ended up sown in the fields. Despite specific campaigns against these feeds, the presence of GMOs was denied for years, because it would have meant admitting that the entire livestock sector, still mindful of the so-called ‘mad cow’ disease, was using such technologies. Clarification was only made after a major sabotage at Veronesi, an Italian company specialising in importing animal feed. A large forecourt with numerous toasted vehicles with their load of quintals of genetically modified feed that had become crunchy and unsuitable for ending up on farms was the backdrop to the arrival in a helicopter of the company owner who, besieged by the press, briefly, perhaps shaken by the incident, admitted that his feed was in fact GMO, having come from the USA. Local groups could have made good on that long-awaited statement that never came in years of demonstrations, but instead it was thought more prudent to distance themselves from the incident. A cautiousness that over the years has always surrounded the so-called debate on GMOs and more generally on genetic engineering, postponing struggles that have never taken on real stability by favouring particular cases and leaving critical thinking, at least in Italy, to contexts that could not see beyond the threat of their own fair trade supply chain. Once again, therefore, mere ‘economic reason’ always proved to be the counterpart in a small paradigm that was easily overwhelmed.
At the European level there was still a block on the entry of GMOs, although in fact Spain and Romania had been flooded with them for some time, but waiting for the right moment, the right emergency that could justify such a radical technological leap in the countryside. But even if there had been no discussion about GMOs in the fields in recent years, the ground had been laid so that when that right moment would come, there would be no great upheaval, as yet another innovation among many. We are talking about the transition from agriculture to agro-industry up to recent times with agriculture 4.0 where digital technology is entering what remains of the countryside. There are those who have promoted this process piece by piece over the years and those who have obviously benefited from it because it is simpler, more modern and above all more subsidised. From the bottom you can see the agro-enterprise that over time has replaced the peasant activity, or rather had to suppress it in order to move forward, whether conscientiously or not money has given the trail to follow and the companies have not let themselves be pushed around. Smaller forms failed to adapt and with them real possibilities of creating communities truly connected to the land were lost. Research on the development of genetic engineering has only rarely been juxtaposed with that on GMOs in agriculture, rather it has been considered as if they were different fields. Once again it was easier for a green environmental company like Greenpeace, a ubiquitous guest at Davos, to ask questions about the new genetic engineering technologies linked to humans, better to talk about soya and deforestation, so as to remain within the established framework of reform and then to give the direction to the new protesters armed with paint who, by the way, are more realistic than the king if the motive is the climate change that so obsesses them and that they understand so little, have already committed themselves to accepting TEAs. In the new resilient eco-sustainable framework where complicity even from below is wasted, the reset of agriculture is announced by technocratic pipers as inevitable, indeed among the first places where intervention promises to be radical. The real alarm, not the umpteenth emergency, should have long since caught our attention when the laboratories started talking about preserving the countryside. It simply meant that the degradation of biodiversity and the social degradation of what was left of the farming world had reached such a level that they were ready for a new imagery arranged by them, using so many companies as accomplices, like those who would see no difference in growing vertically with hydroponics, breeding crickets instead of cows farting CO2, planting extensions of solar panels and wind turbines. And if the species leap got too big, one only had to look at modern industrial animal husbandry to find everything that would be proposed for human societies over the years.
If researchers have come to invent NGT – new genomic techniques – which in Italy curiously enough have been called TEA – assisted evolution technologies, it means that, as one researcher declared after sabotaging a GMO rice plant in Mezzana Bigli, they had been working on it for decades in their laboratories or perhaps in some international project, as happens with vivisection: in Italy it is not possible to torture macaques as one would like and so hospitality is asked of other research centres in countries where the laws are more permissive and then they go back full of good intentions, which means nothing more than moving the various lobbying channels and for agriculture it means starting the contamination and later denouncing the irreversibility of the damage as happened in Latin America.
All these things were denounced in the past when it was US capitalism that was to be criticised, but now that there are small projects, with often young researchers seemingly lacking in ambition who like to be portrayed in inclusive group photos, how do we deal with it? If, instead of Monsanto, we have the State University of Milan, which is about to take its third inclusive bath, and the CREA, which for years has been carrying out these genetic manipulation projects with public subsidies, what do we make of it? It all becomes more difficult and partly leads back to the timid opposition that such projects are having, but does not explain it entirely. It should not be ruled out that many have made their own the climate of permanent emergency that surrounds us; perhaps an answer to this umpteenth emergency could come from the very scientific research that here announces that it is manipulating plants a little, but at other times has heavily manipulated human beings with gene serums. It will be said that they are different levels and that the issues are not superimposable, and some on the left would already begin to wave the bogeyman of conspiracy, an immediate excuse to disengage and avoid making uncomfortable criticisms, but the short memory does not allow us to remember that with the same technology with which plants are now being modified, the CRISP/Cas9, researchers in China have edited the first two daughters of genetic engineering. And yet, despite the deadly legacy of techno-sciences, despite the fact that biolaboratories with gain-of-function research are being relocated and set up here in Italy, where the leading research is in genetic engineering, we still hear fairy tales about good or bad biotechnology, the usual question about the use of the means employed. At the Milan State University where they work on GMO- TEA rice, there cannot be researchers who only aim at profit, as a Monsanto researcher would do, there must probably be a mission and for the local critics they will probably be fellow sufferers who are wrong. The same applies to the strange critical dualism that has led biotechnologists and opponents to speak the same language. How was such a catastrophe possible? These are the times of the smoothing out of conflict, of the smoothing out of the sense of things if research has the face of progressive researchers. Even the protesters who are the children of that faith in science, which in 2024 is only the science of power driving unstoppable biocidal progress, have taken on that chronic possibilism that will contribute to our being surrounded by transgenic chimeras and, what will surely be the most dramatic, no longer recognised as such.
It is time to change the field of complicity in this struggle, which is going to be long and by no means easy; on our side we only have the fact that TEAs are new GMOs, but with the biocidal bearing of the old GMOs, at the message level it will be crucial to make it understood, and never without the separations between fields and bodies all as eco-sisterly prudence would have it.
Once again, the experience of past struggles will come to our aid, what remains of the TEA field in Mezzana Bigli uprooted by generous arms could become the new ‘control field’ as Swiss activists called the ETH Zurich’s GMO experimentation that came to be protected as a military site. The same had happened in Iceland before the research was terminated after yet another visit from the night mowers. Or in England, which saw all of its more than sixty fields destroyed, outdoor research suspended and laws against transparency of information and activists changed.
The little TEA test that you want to reproduce everywhere here in Italy could take other forms. It will be necessary to be vigilant and attentive to how they intend to invade us with their transgenic harmfulness. A good mobilisation with a radical critique of the world of techno-sciences could be an excellent basis for really broadening and diversifying the forms of intervention by intercepting all those who have understood the need to link all these aspects. We know for certain that the biotechnology programme is not something that the system intends to give up, it is the means and the end at the same time with which the Great Transformation is to be initiated in order to push us into a transhuman world.

July 2024, Bergamo, published in the newspaper L’Urlo della Terra, n. 12, July 2024, https://www.resistenzealnanomondo.org/necrotecnologie/ogm-tea-lattacco-al-vivente-continua/