5d. GMO and seeds Flashcards
The politics of seed in Africa’s Green Revolution.
* Critiquing the model of the ‘agro-dealer’ - a plucky, dynamic, individual and male entrepreneur, who enables the spread of technology.
* ‘The maize model’ - large-scale GMO, huge returns, widespread demand. However this doesn’t work for many other crops
* Seeds seen as key to boosting production to curb food insecurity. However, the NGR lacks understanding of the informal system
* Technocratic mindset ignores politics that impacts the movement of investments and seeds within the system
Scoones & Thompson (2011)
A WB report emphasising how smallholders should be integrated into the market.
“The private sector drives the organisation of value chains that bring the market to smallholders… the state corrects market failures, regulates competition and engages strategically in public-private partnerships.”
World Bank (2007)
World Development Report
Case study: Kenya as a poster child for the NGR. The government supported several PPPs to promote the spread tech. However, agro-dealers were disproportionately located in higher potential agricultural areas. In the drylands, demand from poor farmers for seeds and fertilisers is low and variable.
Odama & Muange (2011)
Seed sovereignty - the seed is a prominent symbol of struggle against neoliberal restructuring of nature around the market.
* La Via Campesina identified seeds as the fourth source after land, water and air.
* Until the 1930s, farmers enjoyed nearly complete sovereignty over seeds, using open systems operating on reciprocity and gift exchange.
* The continuous recombination of genetic material produced resilience that is characteristic of peasant-developed crop varieties.
Kloppenburg (2010)
The geographies of transgenic crops.
* Public discourse about global food security is highly abstract
* However, food shortages have inescapably local dynamics depending on agro-ecology, demographics, history ad culture
* This is why GMO is controversial: a singular technological fix cannot be sufficient to address a host of locally diverse problems
* Also, living organisms are unreliable vehicles for standardised scientific knowledge because of their material characteristics: they have ideal habitats and individual strategies (ANT, Robbins, 2007)
* The geography of transgenic crops forms a ‘biohegemonic geopolitics’ involving complex networks of states and institutions pushing a scientific ‘consensus’
Dowd-Uribe (2014a)
Case study: seeds in Burkina Faso.
* High seed prices have dissuaded resource-poor farmers from adopting high yield cotton, which is meant to reduce pesticide use, boost yields and increase profits
* In fact, outcomes are highly variable, and studies have missed this so far because they have not examined larger institutional factors
* E.g. corruption leads to mistrust and discourages farmers from growing cotton
The potential for transgenic crops is influenced by local histories of agricultural innovation, institutional transitions, and socio-political change
Dowd-Uribe (2014b)
Stealth seeds: transgenic seeds that are saved, cross-bred, repackaged, sold and exchanged in an ‘anarchic agrarian captialism’ defying the surveillance of corporations and states.
E.g. Bt cotton and herbicide-resistant soybeans
* Indian farmers bred new transgenic hybrid varieties using illegal original seeds for male contribution + a local variety well-suited to agronomic conditions for female contribution
* In Brazil, farmers found and bred transgenic seeds underground as a form of resistance against Monsanto
* Farmers are not resistant to change but will modulate top-down impositions for their own needs
* This agency is coupled with the biological property of the seed as a material which is easily reproduced
* Altogether, this challenges neoliberal restructuring of agricultural system and continued attempts on the part of hegemonic firms to subsume every part of the agricultural system - a challenge to vertical integration
Herring (2007)
Links to Zaitcheck (2023)
