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Biotechnology: The Seed Panopticon Encounters Arts of Resistance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2021

Ronald J. Herring
Ronald J. Herring*
Affiliation:
Ronald J. Herring (rjh5@cornell.edu) is Professor of Government Emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences and Visiting International Professor of Global Development in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University.
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Extract

James C. Scott’s prodigious work has influenced numerous fields of inquiry, often profoundly, as documented in this forum. This essay suggests how an extension of Scott's theoretical apparatus might provide fresh understanding of stalemated contentious politics of great importance to rural well-being.

Keywords

biopropertyChinacontentious politicsdevelopmental stategenomicsIndiaregulation
Type
Forum—Power and Agency: The Discipline-Shifting Work of James C. Scott
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , May 2021 , pp. 415 - 422
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Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2021

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References

1 Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

2 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 181.

3 Winston, Mark L., Travels in the Genetically Modified Zone (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Pinstrup-Andersen, Per and Schioler, Ebbe, Seeds of Contention: World Hunger and the Global Controversy over GM Crops (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Herring, Ronald J., “Opposition to Transgenic Technologies: Ideology, Interests, and Collective Action Frames,” Nature Reviews Genetics 9 (2008): 458–63CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

4 Scott, Seeing Like a State, chap. 1.

5 Herring, Ronald J. and Paarlberg, Robert L., “The Political Economy of Biotechnology,” Annual Review of Resource Economics 8 (2016): 397–416CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The moral economy dimension of the confrontation reverberates with James C. Scott's pioneering The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976).

6 R. C. Lewontin, “Genes in the Food!,” New York Review of Books, June 21, 2001, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2001/06/21/genes-in-the-food/ (accessed February 4, 2021).

7 Ronald J. Herring and Milind Kandlikar, “Illicit Seeds: Intellectual Property and the Underground Proliferation of Agricultural Biotechnologies,” in Politics of Intellectual Property: Contestation over the Ownership, Use, and Control of Knowledge and Information, ed. Sebastian Haunss and Kenneth C. Shadlen (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009), 56–79.

8 Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).

9 Paarlberg, Robert L., Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept out of Africa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 301, passim; see also Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance.

11 Naim, Moises, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats Are Hijacking the Economy (New York: Doubleday, 2005)Google Scholar.

12 See, for example, Huang, Jikun, Rozelle, Scott, Pray, Carl, and Wang, Qinfang, “Plant Biotechnology in China,” Science 295, no. 5555 (2002): 674–77CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Jikun Huang, Ruifa Hu, Scott Rozelle, and Carl Pray, “Genetically Modified Rice, Yields, and Pesticides: Assessing Farm-Level Productivity Effects in China,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 56, no. 2 (2008): 247–62; Jikun Huang, Carl Pray, and Scott Rozelle, “Enhancing the Crops to Feed the Poor,” Nature 418, no. 6898 (2002): 678–84. On India, see Jonas Kathage and Matin Qaim, “Economic Impacts and Impact Dynamics of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) Cotton in India,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 29 (2012): 11652–56.

13 On the classification of state approaches, see Robert Paarlberg, The Politics of Precaution: Genetically Modified Crops in Developing Countries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 148– 56; Cong Cao, GMO China: How Global Debates Transformed China's Agricultural Biotechnology Policies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 66–69, 76–104, passim; Jane Qiu, “Agriculture: Is China Ready for GM Rice?,” Nature 455, no. 7215 (2008): 850–52; Ron Herring, “China, Rice, and GMOs: Navigating the Global Rift on Genetic Engineering,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, January 15, 2009, https://apjjf.org/-Ron-Herring/3012/article.html (accessed February 4, 2021).

14 For excellent coverage of this episode and politics of biotechnology in the early period, see Ian Scoones, Science, Agriculture and the Politics of Policy (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006); see also Ronald J. Herring, “State Science, Risk and Agricultural Biotechnology: Bt Cotton to Bt Brinjal in India,” Journal of Peasant Studies 42, no. 1 (2015): 159–86.

15 Devparna Roy, Ronald J. Herring, and Charles C. Geisler, “Naturalizing Transgenics: Loose Seeds, Official Seeds, and Risk in the Decision Matrix of Gujarati Cotton Farmers,” Journal of Development Studies 43, no. 1 (2007): 158–78; see also Scoones, Science, Agriculture and the Politics of Policy.

16 N. Chandrasekhara Rao, Carl E. Pray, and Ronald J. Herring, eds., Biotechnology for a Second Green Revolution in India (New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2018), 405–29.

17 Sharad Joshi, “Unquiet on the Western Front,” The Hindu Business Line, December 19, 2001.

18 Deepak Shah, “Bt Cotton in India: A Review of Adoption, Government Interventions and Investment Initiatives,” in Rao, Pray, and Herring, Biotechnology for a Second Green Revolution in India,157–70.

19 Kathage and Qaim, “Economic Impacts and Impact Dynamics”; Prakash Sadashivappa, “Socioeconomic Impacts of Bt Cotton Adoption in India: Evidence from Panel Data,” in Rao, Pray, and Herring, Biotechnology for a Second Green Revolution in India, 293–324.

20 Jayaraman, Killugudi, “Bt Brinjal Splits Indian Cabinet,” Nature Biotechnology 28 (2010): 296CrossRefGoogle Scholar, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nbt0410-296; Ramesh, Jairam, “In Conversation,” Current Science 100, no. 11 (June 10, 2011), 1610Google Scholar; see also Herring, “State Science, Risk and Agricultural Biotechnology.”

21 N. Lalitha and P. K. Viswanathan, “Technology Diffusion and Adoption in Cotton Cultivation,” in Rao, Pray, and Herring, Biotechnology for a Second Green Revolution in India, 379–403.

22 Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 48.

23 Sukanya Shantha, “With ‘GM Satyagraha,’ Maharashtra Farmers Want Public Dialogue About GM Crops,” The Wire, July 7, 2019, https://thewire.in/agriculture/shetkari-sanghatana-htbt-cotton-agricultural-innovation (accessed February 4, 2021); see also Barun S. Mitra, “Maharashtra Farmers Are Asserting Their Freedom by Celebrating HTBt Cotton Crop Harvest,” The Print, January 3, 2020, https://theprint.in/opinion/maharashtra-farmers-are-asserting-their-freedom-by-celebrating-htbt-cotton-crop-harvest/343989/ (accessed February 4, 2021).

24 Filomeno, Felipe Amin, Monsanto and Intellectual Property in South America (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herring, Ronald J., “Stealth Seeds: Bioproperty, Biosafety, Biopolitics,” in Innovation in Agricultural Genomics, ed. Marden, Emily and Godfrey, R. Nelson (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015), 102–39Google Scholar.

25 Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 241.

26 Hefferon, Kathleen L. and Herring, Ronald J., 2017. “The End of the GMO? Genome Editing, Gene Drives and New Frontiers of Plant Technology,” Review of Agrarian Studies 7, no. 2 (2017): 1–32Google Scholar.

27 Doudna, Jennifer and Steinberg, Samuel, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)Google Scholar.