Corporate Crops: Biotechnology, Agriculture, and the Struggle for Control

1. Agricultural Biotechnologies on the Farm and around the World

CHAPTER 1 Agricultural Biotechnologies on the Farm and around the World Introduction While agricultural biotechnologies have brought a significant number of changes to agricultural production, such technologically induced change is not new to agriculture, of course, and is well documented in scholarly literature. Biotechnologies’ proprietary aspects add a new component to such change, however, which have the potential to instigate a social reorganization of agricultural production. Moreover, they may even be introducing a new capital accumulation strategy. Further, it is simply not possible to assess national agricultural change without attention to the global context, and their reciprocal influence. Even historically speaking , agriculture in North America has developed squarely in the context of international trade relations. The current era of “globalization” suggests a deepening of global integration, which lends even greater significance to the international context of national agricultures. At the same time, to assume that local activities are irrelevant in the shaping of the global food regime is to greatly undervalue the myriad influences on the national and subnational level: these influences form the legal and regulatory basis from which new technologies—such as agricultural biotechnologies —are nurtured and can develop into international forces . . . or fade away completely. This chapter will first investigate relevant sociology and political economy of agriculture literatures for what they can contribute to an analysis of capital accumulation strategies in agriculture. It outlines how these literatures apply to GM technologies and where they fall short in explaining developments related to the new technology. Specifically, I suggest that two theoretical concepts of agricultural industrialization identified Biotechnologies on the Farm and around the World 15 by Goodman, Sorj, and Wilkinson (1987)—appropriationism and substitutionism —need to be joined by a third, which I term “expropriationism.” Second, this chapter will seek to place agriculture in its global context by looking at theories about globalization more broadly, relating these to agriculture and food using the food regime perspective. The most convincing approaches to globalization incorporate factors that affect differential integration into the current wave of global economic restructuring. Similarly, the food regime, like globalization itself, is a contested project, vulnerable to resistances. What resistance might be significant enough to alter the shape of the socially problematic third food regime? I argue that local resistance to the technologies’ expropriationist tendencies could be a strong enough reciprocal force to reflect upward on globalization tendencies and change the face of the third food regime. Down on the Farm: The Industrialization of Agriculture? From the classics to contemporary scholarship, political economy of agriculture literature provides many insights into historical capital accumulation trends in agriculture (see, e.g., Berlan, 1991; Buttel and LaRamee, 1991; Friedland, 2002; Friedmann, 1995b; Kautsky, 1988 [1899]; Lenin, 1964 [1899]; Thompson and Cowan, 1995). Many of these literatures have highlighted historical trends of industrialization that are applicable to agriculture: increased capitalization, concentration of agricultural input suppliers and output purchasers; substitution of independent producers with agribusinesses; increased productivity; the externalization of environmental costs; and the transformation of consumption patterns, among others. In some cases, the parallels with industrialization are drawn to the extent of rejecting agriculture’s analytical separation from industry (Goodman and Watts, 1994:3). Despite the similarities, agriculture has retained a number of distinctions from industry due to its particularities as a nature-based process. Many aspects of agriculture deviate from typical capital accumulation patterns, and consequently theoretical distinctions are required. Like Goodman and Watts (1994), I argue that the natural processes of agriculture do in fact render it exceptional to industrialization. Scholarly works that account for rather than artificially downplay this exceptionalism provide the greatest insight into agriculture, and the greatest predictive capacity for its future development. In particular, the conceptual tools of appropriationism and substitutionism, developed by Goodman, 16 Biotechnologies on the Farm and around the World Sorj, and Wilkinson (1987), provide an analytical framework through which many historical as well as current developments in agriculture can be viewed. As noted, developments in biotechnology are introducing new forums for capital to meet agriculture that cannot be accounted for by these concepts. Notably, a network of legal obligations associated with the technologies suggests that legal means may have joined these traditional capital accumulation strategies in agriculture. Further, legal altercations over the issue of infringement and involuntary contamination highlight growing issues with respect to the genetic ownership that directly pit the rights of farmers against the rights of industry. Biotechnology critics additionally claim that contamination issues legally intimidate...