"The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you're a farmer and you're growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm"
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Rifkin’s line isn’t trying to “educate” the public so much as enlist it. The opening clause, “The public should know,” is a classic pressure move: it implies a quiet cover-up, a gap between what’s happening and what regulators are willing to admit. Then he twists the knife with “have yet to be resolved, or even raised” - the real indictment isn’t that biotech has risks, it’s that the system hasn’t even framed the right questions. Liability becomes the rhetorical wedge because it’s where abstract science turns into concrete blame, lawsuits, and ruined livelihoods.
The farmer example is doing double work. On the surface it’s folksy and legible: genes “flow” the way water or dust does, indifferent to property lines. Underneath, it attacks a cornerstone of biotech’s business model: the idea that genetic modifications can be neatly owned, controlled, and contained. If pollen doesn’t respect fences, then “responsibility” can’t be confined to the farmer who bought the seed. Rifkin is pointing toward a collision between biology (messy, promiscuous, inevitable) and law (bounded, contractual, eager for a defendant).
The context is a late-20th/early-21st century regulatory fight where genetically engineered crops expanded faster than the legal norms around contamination, patent enforcement, and insurance. By foregrounding liability rather than morality, Rifkin reframes the debate from “Are GMOs safe?” to “Who pays when containment is a fantasy?” That shift is strategic: it drags corporate risk out of the fine print and into the neighbor’s field.
The farmer example is doing double work. On the surface it’s folksy and legible: genes “flow” the way water or dust does, indifferent to property lines. Underneath, it attacks a cornerstone of biotech’s business model: the idea that genetic modifications can be neatly owned, controlled, and contained. If pollen doesn’t respect fences, then “responsibility” can’t be confined to the farmer who bought the seed. Rifkin is pointing toward a collision between biology (messy, promiscuous, inevitable) and law (bounded, contractual, eager for a defendant).
The context is a late-20th/early-21st century regulatory fight where genetically engineered crops expanded faster than the legal norms around contamination, patent enforcement, and insurance. By foregrounding liability rather than morality, Rifkin reframes the debate from “Are GMOs safe?” to “Who pays when containment is a fantasy?” That shift is strategic: it drags corporate risk out of the fine print and into the neighbor’s field.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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