Ronald J. Herring

Stealth seeds: Bioproperty, biosafety, biopolitics

Abstract Transgenic seeds in both India (Bt cotton) and Brazil (glyphosate-resistant soybeans) spread widely and rapidly through farming communities outside the reach of biosafety or bioproperty institutions. Stealth transgenics are saved, cross-bred, repackaged, sold, exchanged and planted in an anarchic agrarian capitalism that defies surveillance and control of firms and states. The outcome is more pro-poor than alternative modes of diffusion, but undermines a growing consensus in the international development community on appropriate bio-safety and intellectual property institutions for biotechnology. Second, stealth procurement of biotechnology divides nominally pro-poor political coalitions, driven by a great ideational divide on uncertainties and risks of transgenics. The ability of seeds to move underground through stealth strategies of farmers undermines widely-assumed bio-safety-regime capability. Likewise, property in biotechnology appears less monopolistic and powerful, more relational and contingent. Stealth practices of farmers in pursuit of transgenics contrary to wishes of firms, states and many NGOs suggest a different model of the farmer than that often encountered in both developmentalist and anti-‘GMO’ discourse: more active, creative and autonomous, less hapless and supine. Resultant incapacity of social institutions to secure interests of firms and states in biotechnology renders more likely eventual development of controls from genetic engineering – the ‘terminator technology’ of political dramaturgy.

The Genomics Revolution and Development Studies: Science, Poverty and Politics

Abstract The genomics revolution in biology has enabled technologies with unprecedented potential; genetic engineering is changing the terrain of development studies. Societies have reacted with indifference or appreciation to genetically engineered pharmaceuticals, beginning with insulin; yet for food and agriculture, a globally contentious politics and unprecedented policy dilemmas have arisen. Transgenic organisms raise questions of property, ethics and safety unimaginable a generation ago: what can be owned and with what responsibility? Much turns on science: how one conceptualizes evidence, knowledge, uncertainty and risk. Both opponents and proponents of frontier applications in biotechnology have a poverty story to tell, but with divergent implications. The balance in this global debate has perceptibly shifted; a new developmentalist consensus concludes that the worlds poor may benefit from genetic engineering: the question is ‘under what conditions’? This essay introduces a collection of scholarly treatments that begin with the needs of the poor – for income, nutrition, environmental integrity – and evaluate theory and evidence for contributions from transgenic crops. The new consensus assumes much about biosafety, bioproperty and biopolitics that is contrary to ground realities – the actual capacity of firms and states to monitor and control biotechnology – but raises new questions at the frontiers of development studies.

Guaranteeing employment to the rural poor: Social functions and class interests in the employment guarantee scheme in Western India

Abstract Numerous observers rightly term the landless rural population the ‘most intractable development problem’ in poor societies. Given the extraordinary political and administrative obstacles to redistrubution of rural assets in India (the widely-recognized failture land reforms), attention and finances have recently been focused on public rural employment programmes to alleviate rural distribution. Within India, the State of Maharashtra, with a size and population of a large European nation, has instituted a striking departure from traditional rural works programmes: a guarantee of employment to rural adults on demand. The Employment Guarantee Scheme in one state has since become a significant policy model, and the experience in that state provides something like a laboratory for its analysis. Based on analysis of previous studies and original field work in rural Maharashtra, the article argues that the scheme is something of a rare bird: a programme which seems to be in the objective and subjective interests of the rural poor, as well as consistent with the interests of the rural landed elite, despite their early political objections. The fiscal structure of the scheme is a direct contradiction of Liptons (1977) model of ‘urban bias’ in Third World development strategies; the Employment Guarantee Scheme is rather more a manifestation of ‘kulak power’. Though promulgated as an alternative to policies entailing redistribution of rural assets, and clearly superior to doing nothing about rural distribution, the scheme is inferior to genuine redistribution in terms of altering the rural political economy. The functions, if not the motivations, of the scheme are profoundly conservative in a structural sense, politically and economically; the philosophical underpinnings, and perhaps , potentially, the consequences for mobilization of the rural poor, are quite the opposite.

Whose numbers count? Probing discrepant evidence on transgenic cotton in the Warangal district of India

Abstract The relationship between poverty and transgenic agricultural crops has created a global rift in development studies. Some, but not all, questions in this debate should be amenable to empirical treatment. Field studies have generated divergent numbers on yields and other agronomic outcomes. Studies from India come to diametrically opposed findings about Bt cotton: either the technology is scale-neutral and profitable for farmers of all size classes, or produces rural catastrophe – reaching the characterization ‘genocidal’ in one prominent critique. This essay suggests a method learned from field investigation of data volatility across studies in the most controversial district in India. The method involves a multidisciplinary team concentrating on plausible mechanisms for data distortion at the field level. Interpolating among studies and field results, this essay concludes that widespread reports of ‘the failure of Bt cotton in India’ – on agronomic, economic and environmental grounds – are not sustainable scientifically but do have plausible origins in methodology and in interests connected to the contentious politics around ‘GMOs’ globally.

Naturalising transgenics: Official seeds, loose seeds and risk in the decision matrix of Gujarati cotton farmers

Abstract Cotton farmers in Gujarat, western India, faced a novel decision matrix when Delhi gave provisional approval, in March 2002, to Mahyco–Monsanto Biotech Ltd. to release three Bt-cotton varieties. These varieties represented Indias first legally commercialised transgenics: official seeds. Unofficial transgenic seeds were also available to farmers both as unpackaged, unbranded ‘loose seeds’ – mostly F2 progeny of a popular but banned transgenic variety – and as packaged, branded local gray-market Bt cultivars not approved by government. This essay utilises original field research to analyse the reasoning frame of farmers in choosing which seeds to plant. It finds that Bt cotton varieties were valued by farmers for reduction of pest damage, pesticide cost and thus improvement of yields and income. Second, choices among Bt varieties are complex, riding on seed-cost differentials between official and stealth cultivars and variable fit of varieties to local agronomic conditions. Third, some farmers chose non-Bt cultivars, for various reasons, including preference for organic cultivation – though some considered Bt cotton compatible with organic agriculture. Cotton farmers in Gujarat have in effect naturalised transgenic varieties, slotting them into familiar strategies to hedge risks.

WHY DID “OPERATION CREMATE MONSANTO” FAIL?

ABSTRACT Though promoted by the Government of India, and endorsed by dominant international organizations concerned with agriculture, biotechnology has produced fierce resistance and divisions. “Operation Cremate Monsanto” combined nationalist appeals, opposition to multinational capital, and rejection of genetic engineering in one integrated critique. The movement failed; Monsantos technology spread rapidly and widely in India. The movement illustrated a larger problematic of understanding interests under conditions of rapid and complex technological change. Science continually presents new challenges to the way interests are understood by citizens and political classes that control states; the sea change in redefinitions of interests — of both individuals and states — introduced by, for example, the atmospheric science of ozone holes and climate change is archetypal, as are the internationally contentious battles in trade and property of “genetically modified organisms.” Interests in biotechnology are screened by science, understandings of which are unevenly distributed. Asymmetries of knowledge and skill repertory necessary for participation in global networks of contestation create new class positions within India, and corresponding contradictions in social movements. Cultural capital matters fundamentally in differentiating classes and class interests; authenticity rents become available to some class positions but not others. Divisions matter because movements seeking environmental integrity and social justice may ultimately be weakened by egregious inaccuracies of framing, however effective the short-terms gains in dramaturgy may be.

Rethinking the commons

Common property has been theoretically linked to environmental degradation through the metaphor of “the tragedy of the commons,” which discounts local solutions to commons dilemmas and typically posits the need for strong states or privatization. Though neither solution is theoretically or empirically adequate—because of the nature of states and nature in the real world—local arrangements for averting the tragedy suffer certain lacunaeas well, including stringent boundary conditions and overlapping/overarching commons situations that necessitate larger scale cooperation than is possible in the face-to-face communities that are conducive to cooperation. Second-order or meta-commons issues expand the scope of inquiry necessarily beyond conservationto preservation.The Sundarbans illustrates the contradictory implications of the Leviathan solution to comons dilemmas, as well as the centrality of alternative perceptual framings of natural systems.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the “Eradication of Feudalism” in Pakistan

Early in his tenure in office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto announced that his agrarian reforms would affect the lives of the common people of Pakistan more than any other measure contemplated by his avowedly socialist and populist regime. Almost seven years later, the martial law regime of Zia-ul-Haq issued a White Paper on the performance of Bhuttos government (which Zia ended with a coup in July of 1977), charging that the land reforms were in practice yet another example of that Governments cynical posturing, sinister manipulation, favoritism and victimization, corruption and abuse of power. The irony is that a centerpiece of Bhuttos program for the “salvation” of Pakistan should appear in a White Paper which attempted to add legitimacy to the execution of the popular ex-Prime Minister. A further irony is that Bhutto himself came from a background which could only be called “feudal” in the terms of Pakistani political discourse, and surrounded himself politically with scions of similar families. What was meant by Bhuttos pledge to eradicate feudalism via land reform and what are we to make of it?

State science, risk and agricultural biotechnology: Bt cotton to Bt Brinjal in India

Agricultural biotechnology has been a project of Indias developmental state since 1986, but implementation generated significant conflict. Sequential cases of two crops carrying the same transgene – Bt cotton and Bt brinjal (eggplant/aubergine) – facing the same authorization procedures produced different outcomes. The state science that approved Bt cotton was attacked as biased and dangerously inadequate by opponents, but the technology spread to virtually universal adoption by farmers. Bt aubergine was approved by the same Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), but the decision was overruled, the GEAC downgraded and a moratorium imposed on the crop. Resultant conflicts engaged international networks, expanded the domestic arena in which science is contested and instigated restructuring of institutions for governance of genetic engineering. Divergent trajectories of the two crops corresponded to global patterns, but also reflected differences in agro-ecologies and state interests. In Bt cotton, state and cultivator interests dominated precautionary logics; in Bt eggplant, politics of risk dominated questions of agro-economics. The cases illustrate both the inherent vulnerability of science in politics and specific vulnerabilities of science embedded in particular institutions. Differences in institutional specificity of state science matter politically in explaining variation across countries in adoption and rejection of genetically engineered crops.

INTRODUCTION: Restoring Agency to Class: Puzzles from the Subcontinent

Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics in South Asia. Yet in the subcontinent class has lost its centrality as a way of understanding the world and how it changes. Indian intellectuals have been a major force in the eclipsing of class through discursive strategies of constructivist idealism. Formalism in social sciences finds class relations elusive and difficult to measure. Market triumphalism eclipsed concern with rehabilitation of “weaker sectors” and redressing of exploitation as measures of national success. Class analytics, however, continues to serve two critical functions: disaggregating development and explaining challenges to rules of the game. Restoring agency to class requires attention first to relations that structure choice in restricted or expansive ways. Global forces have altered peoples relations to production and to one another, as have changes in the political opportunity structure, with significant effects on tactics and outcomes. ...ABSTRACT Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics in South Asia. Yet in the subcontinent class has lost its centrality as a way of understanding the world and how it changes. Indian intellectuals have been a major force in the eclipsing of class through discursive strategies of constructivist idealism. Formalism in social sciences finds class relations elusive and difficult to measure. Market triumphalism eclipsed concern with rehabilitation of “weaker sectors” and redressing of exploitation as measures of national success. Class analytics, however, continues to serve two critical functions: disaggregating development and explaining challenges to rules of the game. Restoring agency to class requires attention first to relations that structure choice in restricted or expansive ways. Global forces have altered peoples relations to production and to one another, as have changes in the political opportunity structure, with significant effects on tactics and outcomes. Knowing how to aggregate or disaggregate classes is more complicated than ever. Nevertheless, alternative understandings of class structure are more than academic: they reflect the strategies of political actors. The difficulty for class analysis is to illuminate the conditions under which interests of those disabled by particular class systems may be inter-subjectively recognized and acted upon politically at the local and/or international levels. Appropriate and robust sociopolitical theory for this purpose is illusive, but no more so for class than for other bases of difference — caste, community, identity, gender—that likewise seek to explain transformation of locations in social structures to effective collective agency.