Agricultural Biotechnology, Social Ethics, and Family Farms

Abstract After nearly a century of neglect, agriculture is receiving increased attention from intellectuals concerned with social ethics. Along with the ethical dimensions of agriculture's impact on the environment and nonhuman animals, one fundamental ethical concern is the plight of the family farm, the traditional farming unit around the globe. The family farm is considered by many ethicists to have special moral, cultural, or political‐economic significance, and various social and economic forces—especially new agricultural technologies—appear to threaten to drive the family farm to extinction. The increased reliance on high technology approaches to farming, and the increasing dependence of agriculture on other sectors of the economy, especially manufacturing and petrochemical refining, is referred to as the industrialization of agriculture. While the industrialization of agriculture has been a century‐long trend, the emergence of agricultural biotechnology in the 1970s heightened concerns that the family farm was becoming even more threatened. This is because agricultural biotechnology was thought to benefit primarily (or exclusively) large, already industrialized farms. If, as some people argue, society has some ethical obligation to protect or save family farms, then industrialization overall, and the new agricultural biotechnologies in particular, are cause for serious ethical concern. Independent of religious or environmental objections to biotechnology, there are three “family farm critiques” of agricultural biotechnology. These are based on the potential damage biotechnology might inflict on (1) an important political‐economic entity, (2) a cherished symbol if not the embodiment of basic moral values, and (3) the solution to long‐term natural resource problems.