EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL • SPRING 2020 13The Pacific Declaration:
20 Years Later
by Anna Lappé
When my father, Marc Lappé, died in
2005 at the age of 62 from glioblastoma,
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manuscript. In the wake of his death,
while struggling to make sense of a
world without him, I holed up in a
writers’ retreat on the rocky coastline
of Provincetown, Massachusetts to see
if I could transform his rough ideas into
something presentable — and publish
what would have been his 15th book.
I never succeeded. But the central
idea of his book has stayed with me
all these years. Drafted at the dawn of
the age of genetic engineering — long
before the development of CRISPR
technologies and new ways to alter life
as we know it — the book’s message
was simple: We’ve developed frame-
works within and across nation states
for protecting environmental integrity
for future generations (think the US
Endangered Species Act). Now, as we
attempt to alter the genetic makeup of
living beings, we need new strategies
and frameworks for protecting the
planet’s genetic integrity for future gen-
erations. He was writing as a scientist,
an ethicist — and a parent.
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insight from so many years ago on
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Declaration,” a statement of the
ethical principles for this era of genetic
engineering that my father and two
dozen scientists, ethicists, and authors
crafted on another rocky coastline in
Bolinas, California and published in
October 1999.
The Declaration states: “In
recognition of the fundamental
importance of our planet’s natural
genetic heritage and diversity, and
in acknowledgment of the power
of genetic engineering to transform
this heritage, [we] believe that the
proponents and practitioners of
genetic technologies must adhere to the
principles of prudence, transparency,
and accountability.”
The document was fundamentally
a call to apply the precautionary
principle to our collective approach to
genetic engineering. The authors noted
that the burden of proof must be on
those promoting genetic engineering
to show that these technologies
“contribute to the general welfare
of consumers, farmers, and society.”
And that they do so, importantly,
“without compromising the viability
of traditional agricultural practices,
including organic farming.”
The Declaration was also a call to
bring democratic deliberation to deci-
sions about regulation and research
priorities: “In democratic societies,
any decision to deploy powerful new
technologies must be made with full
public participation and account-
ability,” the Declaration states. And it
was a demand for “food sovereignty,”
the concept developed in the 1990s by
the global peasant movement, La Via
Campesina, that calls for farmer and
community power over what food is
grown, where, and how.
The month after my father
and others gathered to write this
Declaration, I found myself getting
tear gassed in the streets of Seattle. At
the time, I was a graduate student at
Columbia University, studying tradepolicy and globalization. Participating
in the global action against the World
Trade Organization — the so-called
“Battle of Seattle” — felt like an
appropriate extracurricular activity.
The Seattle action was also
intimately tied to the work of my father
and his colleagues. For the massive
demonstrations in November 1999
against the new global trade regime
were also about the future of food and
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farmers and eaters all around the world.
In the streets, I heard as much from the
Teamsters and environmentalists as I
heard from Mexican farmers calling
for protections of their corn markets
in the face of American genetically
engineered corn imports.
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penned in 1999, commodity agri-
culture in the US has been remade
by genetic engineering. The majority
of US corn and soy grown today has
been genetically engineered — most of
it to be resistant to the toxic herbicide
Roundup. And the impacts of genetic
engineering can now be felt in com-
munities around the world burdened
with exposure to toxic pesticides used
in concert with these crops, including
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cancers thought to be linked to the
weedkiller Roundup — with lawsuits
pending against its producer, Bayer
(which bought Monsanto in 2018).
Today, despite the urging of scientists
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Declaration, there are no pre cautionary
principles in the US regulatory system
for these technologies.
When my dad and his colleagues
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call for all of us to ask big questions of
this new genetic age:?PWJMVMÅ\['?PW
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questions are just as pressing.Going Beneath the Headlines | digging deeper