Who catches the biotech train? Understanding diverging political responses to GMOs in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Agricultural biotechnology in general and ‘genetically modified organisms’ in particular present, depending on whom you believe, either great opportunities for – or threats to – the future of farming and of food security in Southeast Asia. As a reflection of this cognitive rift, countries in the region have adopted divergent policies on genetically modified crops. Although both countries strove to become biotech pioneers in the 1990s, today the Philippines has emerged as the regional leader in this second Green Revolution, whereas Thailand effectively has rejected the new technology. How can we explain these divergent biotechnological trajectories? In this essay I argue that the answer is to be found in the impact of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which paved the way for mobilization and empowerment of opponents of agricultural biotechnology in Thailand, but not, or much less so, in the Philippines. In Thailand, genetically modified crops came increasingly to be perceived as incompatible with an ascendant and eventually hegemonic new development paradigm – sufficiency economy.