A few weeks back, Alan Jacobs wrote an eminently reasonable response to claims that luddites were winning the tech wars that can be summarized thusly: "Hooey."
What world does Michael Solana live in? Apparently, a world where Luddites have taken power and have driven our kind and benevolent technologists into some pitiful hole-and-corner existence, where no one dares to suggest that technology can solve our problems. ... I have to say, it’s pretty cool to get a report from such a peculiar land. Where you and I live, of course, technology companies are among the largest and most powerful in the world, our media are utterly saturated with the prophetic utterances of their high priests, and people continually seek high-tech solutions to every imaginable problem, from obesity to road rage to poor reading scores in our schools.
This is all spot on: Tech will save us everywhere and in every endeavor, and there are no shortage of folks selling that idea. There is one area where the luddites are having remarkably more success, however, and that's farming. Specifically, the spread of genetically modified crops, which luddites have convinced a number of nations to ban outright and others to strictly limit. The arguments against GMOs are not scientific. Rather, they are couched in vaguely mystical, if not outright religious, terms, as Michael Specter recently noted in his profile of Vandana Shiva for the New Yorker:
Like Gandhi, whom she reveres, Shiva questions many of the goals of contemporary civilization. Last year, Prince Charles, who keeps a bust of Shiva on display at Highgrove, his family house, visited her at the Navdanya farm, in Dehradun, about a hundred and fifty miles north of New Delhi. Charles, perhaps the world’s best-known critic of modern life, has for years denounced transgenic crops. "This kind of genetic modification takes mankind into realms that belong to God and God alone," he wrote in the nineteen-nineties, when Monsanto tried to sell its genetically engineered seeds in Europe. Shiva, too, invokes religion in her assault on agricultural biotechnology. "G.M.O. stands for ‘God, Move Over,’ we are the creators now," she said in a speech earlier this year.
These activists are so extreme they would literally rather see people die than be helped by GMOs:
At times, Shiva’s absolutism about G.M.O.s can lead her in strange directions. In 1999, ten thousand people were killed and millions were left homeless when a cyclone hit India’s eastern coastal state of Orissa. When the U.S. government dispatched grain and soy to help feed the desperate victims, Shiva held a news conference in New Delhi and said that the donation was proof that "the United States has been using the Orissa victims as guinea pigs" for genetically engineered products. She also wrote to the international relief agency Oxfam to say that she hoped it wasn’t planning to send genetically modified foods to feed the starving survivors. When neither the U.S. nor Oxfam altered its plans, she condemned the Indian government for accepting the provisions.
Unlike the tech luddites—who are fighting a rearguard action, and a losing one at that, against the tech triumphalists—the GMO luddites are taken seriously by serious people and wield serious influence. Their claptrap is particularly pernicious, dooming regions and peoples to hunger and malnutrition. If they had their way entirely, billions would likely starve.