For millennia, farmers have saved seeds from one farming season to another. This natural and logical process is slowly becoming impossible, both lawfully and biologically. In 1980—the year Jimmy Carter took the presidency from Ronald Reagan—the U.S. Supreme Court decided to allow the patenting of seeds: an unprecedented decision that laid the groundwork for corporations to gain control of global food supply, primarily through genetic modification and patent licensing. With patenting came control of seed access. Farmers who bought patented GM seeds could no longer save them to re-sow—unless they paid a license fee.

The food industry is increasingly dominated by a handful of powerful corporations that control nearly every aspect of how our food is produced (and who produces it). Giant biotech corporations—Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, Dow, and DuPont—have bought up over 200 competing seed companies and have patented many, allowing them to control access to seeds and the quality of seeds used. Their use of genetic modification (GM) creates a monopoly-game with mafia-like rules in which companies create an entire system of food production that relies on their other products. Monsanto soybeans, for example are engineered to withstand Roundup, Monsanto’s own carcinogenic glyphosate-based weed killer. In areas where Roundup is used, only the Monsanto seeds will survive. All others, including natural plants—not just “weeds”—will be impacted. Roundup doesn’t respect borders; this forces down-wind farmers to use the resistant GM seeds, in turn forcing them to use Roundup.

Philip Howard at Michigan University stated in The Ecologist that “increasing power of seed companies is incompatible with renewable agricultural practices, and one solution to restricting their control would be through banning the practice of granting patents on seeds, plants and genes.

Chemicals such as Roundup find their way in soil, water and vegetation within and outside the target area. The health of these natural systems including the farmers themselves (and consumers) is impacted. Several court cases were recently filed against Monsanto to do with the detrimental effects (such as causing cancer and neurological damage) of inhaling the fumes of their glyphosate-based weed-killers and Lasso, which contains monochlorobenzene (banned in Canada in 1985 and Belgium and Britain in 1992). This includes a 2018 California case and a 2019 case in France. Monsanto admitted that it faces thousands of similar lawsuits in the United States. Monsanto still denies that the Roundup causes cancer and has challenged findings by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, which classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen” in 2015.

Over time the “weeds” and insects become resistant to the chemical pesticides, requiring farmers to use harsher versions and creating an arms race of dangerous chemicals in the environment.

When genetic modification was first introduced decades ago, ecologists feared that transgenic crops might cross-pollinate in the wild—swap introduced genes—potentially wiping out entire groups of natural organisms to impact biodiversity in the wild. In other words, the invasive GM plants would become the new “weeds,” muscling in on and monopolizing a former diverse ecosystem. The ultimate consequence of a lower diversity (and monocultures) is an ecosystem far more susceptible to calamity and catastrophic change…

 

So, let me tell you a story… Well, let me tell you about Paolo Bacigalupi’s story…

Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2015 biopunk science fiction novel The Windup Girl occurs in 23^rd century post-food crash Thailand after global warming has raised sea levels and carbon fuel sources are depleted. Thailand struggles under the tyrannical boot of ag-biotech multinational giants such as AgriGen, RedStar, and PurCal—predatory companies who have fomented corruption and political strife through their plague-inducing and sterilizing genetic manipulations. The story’s chilling premise could very easily be described as “what would happen if Monsanto and friends got their way?”

Bacigalupi’s story opens in Bangkok, “City of Angels”, now below sea level and precariously protected by a giant sea wall and pumps that run on bio-power:

It’s difficult not to always be aware of those high walls and the pressure of the water beyond. Difficult not to think of the City of Divine Beings as anything other than a disaster waiting to happen. But the Thais are stubborn and have fought to keep their revered city of Krung Thep from drowning. With coal-burning pumps and leveed labor and a deep faith in the visionary leadership of their Chakri Dynasty they have so far kept at bay that thing which has swallowed New York and Rangoon, Mumbai and New Orleans.

Energy storage in this post-oil society is provided by manually-wound springs using cruelly mistreated genehacked megodonts—elephant-like slave labor. Biotechnology dominates via international mega-corporations—called calorie companies—that control food production through genehacked seeds. The companies use bioterrorism and economic hitmen to secure markets for their products—just as Monsanto is currently doing. Plagues (some they created, others unintended mutations) have wiped out the natural seed stock, now virtually supplanted by genetically engineered sterile plants and mutant pests such as cibiscosis, blister rust, and genehack weevil. Thailand—one of the economically disadvantaged—has avoided economic subjugation by the foreign calorie companies through some ingenuity—a hidden seedbank of diverse natural seeds—and is now targeted by the agri-corporations.

Bacigalupi’s opening entwines the clogged and crumbling city of Bangkok and its swarming beggars, slaves and laborers in a microcosm of a world spinning out of control:

Overhead, the towers of Bangkok’s old Expansion loom, robed in vines and mold, windows long ago blown out, great bones picked clean. Without air conditioning or elevators to make them habitable, they stand and blister in the sun. The black smoke of illegal dung fires wafts from their pores, marking where Malayan refugees hurriedly scald chapatis and boil kopi before the white shirts can storm the sweltering heights and beat them for their infringements.

Anderson Lake is a farang (of white race) who owns an AgriGen factory trying to mass-produce kink-springs—successors to the internal combustion engine) to store energy. The factory is in fact a cover for his real mission: to find and exploit the secret Thai seedbank with its wealth of genetic material. We later discover that Lake is an economic hitman and spy whose previous missions have destroyed entire countries for the sake of gene monopoly.

Emiko is an illegal Japanese “windup” (genetically modified human), owned by a Thai sex club owner, and treated as a sub-human slave. When she meets Lake, he cavalierly shares that a refuge in the remnant forests of northern Thailand exists for people like her (the “New People”); Emiko dreams of escaping her bonds to find her own people in the north. But like Bangkok itself, both protected and trapped by the wall against a sea poised to claim it—a bustling city of squalor caught up in the clash of new and old—Emiko cannot escape who and what she is: a gifted modified human—and possible herald of a sustainable future—vilified and feared by the very humanity that created her.

 

Bangkok emerges as a central character in a story that explores the paradox of conflicting dialectics battling for survival in a violently changing world. Anyone who has spent time in Bangkok will recognize the connective tissue that holds together its crumbling remnants with ambitious chic. Just like the novel’s cheshires: genetically created “cats” (made by an agri-giant as a “toy”) that wiped out the regular cat Felis domesicus. Named after Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat, these crafty creatures have adapted well to Bangkok’s unstable environment. The cheshires exemplify the cost of unintended consequence (a major theme in the novel); the cheshires also reflect the paradoxical nature of a shape-shifting city of Thais, Chinese and Malaya refuges who struggle to survive in a place that is both haven and danger:

disappearing Cheshire Cat

The flicker-shimmer shapes of cheshires twine, yowling and hoping for scraps … The old man’s flinch is as hallucinogenic as a cheshire’s fade—one moment there, the next gone and doubted … The devil cats flicker closer. Calico and ginger, black as night—all of them fading in and out of view as their bodies take on the colors of their surroundings.

Captain Jaidee Rojjanasukchai is a righteous white shirt—the strong arm of the Ministry of the Environment. He is a faithful Thai Buddhist, whose only weakness is his sense of invincibility borne from a mistaken sense of government integrity. Revered by fellow white shirts as the “Tiger of Bangkok,” he is incorruptible—we find out that he may be the only person in the entire place who refuses to be swayed by bribes. A true and passionate believer in the cause he is fighting for—the very survival of the environment and his people by association—Jaidee is ruthless in his raids and attacks on those who wish to open the markets of globalization and potential contamination. The Tiger of Bangkok represents the Ministry of Environment’s hard policy of environmental protection—the only thing that kept Thailand from falling to the global mega-corporation’s plagues. Early in the novel, Jaidee reflects on humanity’s impact on the ecological cycle:

All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards, and disposal questions, and so the Ministry has found itself in the centre of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others’ lives for it.

Bacigalupi astutely identifies the tenuous role of any government’s environment ministry—to protect and champion the environment—within a government that values its economy more highly and when, in fact, most of the time its members operate quietly in the pocket of short-sighted politicians and business men who focus on short-term gain. “The symbol for the Environment Ministry is the eye of the tortoise, for the long view—the understanding that nothing comes cheap or quickly without a hidden cost,” Jaidee thinks. The United States EPA is a prime example of such paradox—in which the agency’s top executive is in fact a former industrialist who lobbied for deregulation. The current EPA no longer fulfills its role as guardian of the environment. In Canada, I have witnessed terrible conflict between one ministry with another in a game of greed vs. protection. Bacigalupi showcases this diametric with his characters Pracha (Environment) and Akkarat (Trade).

The rivalry between Thailand’s Minister of Trade and Minister of the Environment represent the central conflict of the novel, reflecting the current conflict of neo-liberal promotion of globalization and its senseless exploitation (Akkarat) with the forces of sustainability, fierce environmental protection and (in some cases) isolationism (Pracha). Given the setting and the two men vying for power, both scenarios are extreme and there appears no middle ground for a balanced existence using responsible and sustainable means. And between these two forces lies the snake of exploitation and greed: AgriGen—taunting and teasing with bobbles and trinkets—but harboring disease and destruction.

Emiko, who represents a possible future, is precariously poised; Jaidee, the single individual who refuses to succumb to the bribes of a dying civilization—is sacrificed: just as integrity and righteousness are violently destroyed when chaos threatens and engulfs.

After Jaidee’s brutal killing, the storyline drifts, and I along with it, through a growing miasma as the rising sea reclaims the City of Angels, chasing refugees into the genehack-destroyed forests. I drift, alone, amid the remaining characters—each pathetic in their own way—on a slow slide into the wrathful hell of a vengeful Nature. I found myself rooting for the cheshires and windups, experiments-turned victims-turned adapted survivors of a vast unintended consequence in human greed.

Perhaps that is what Bacigalupi intended.

Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” will be released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in 2020.