: 
Global Law Working Papers
2005 Series
GLWP 06/05
Author
Post-Doctoral Fellow, McGill University Faculty of Law
Title
"Nature/Culture Clash: The Transnational Trade Dispute over GMOs"
Abstract
This paper aims to offer a fresh perspective regarding what is at stake in the cross-cultural trade dispute over genetically-modified organisms by subjecting a particular discursive sample, the parties' submissions to the WTO Panel, to critical scrutiny. The first step of the analysis involves a survey of the rhetorical strategies deployed by the parties in the presentation of their arguments to the Panel. Next, the paper embarks on the task of "disassembling the double helix." The use of the term "double helix" in this analysis refers to the close coupling of scientific and legal discourses in the trade regime: science and law are two parallel strands of discourse wound around each other, each punctuated at intervals by key binding sites where linkages between the strands are anchored. The image that the author aims to conjure up, of course, is the one made famous by Watson & Crick's 1953 discovery of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), which has led, inevitably, to the advances in molecular biology and to the technologies so contested in their current application to the task of "improving" food. The conflict under the rhetorical microscope in this study is the transnational "food fight" between the United States, Canada, and Argentina, on one hand, and the European Communities, on the other. This work attempts to unfurl that twisted ladder and peel apart the strands of scientific and legal discourse that are coiled together in the "double helix" of international trade law. This paper concludes by exploring some of the "rhetorical-ideological tasks" that nature is called upon to perform. While we are becoming familiar with the WTO as a place where "rival renderings of nature" are forced to "confront each other...packaged in the idioms of legal discourse," the GMO dispute raises original and important questions about the role for culture in the science-based trade disciplines of the WTO.
Contact Information
dayna.scott@mcgill.ca
