Another Technoscience is Possible

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Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities

edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota

The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives

When Foucault introduced the concept of biopolitics he referred to a historically specific power agenda involving a particular approach to life. This approach was at the root of the modern sciences of biology and political economy, both of which set out to describe, explain and manage their objects of study as abstract processes of production and reproduction. Agricultural science must be situated in relation to the biopolitical agenda of 'applying' the modern scientific approach to the management of social life. The scientification of agriculture took place in the United States towards the end of the 19th century through a process that entailed both a delegitimation of farmer-generated knowledges and the production of new, modern subjectivities. As farmers became entrepreneurs in need of scientific education and advice, newly trained agronomists devoted themselves to designing fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid seeds with the goal of maximizing yields. Public institutions were created which coordinated agricultural production with both science and trade policy. Agricultural science was thus inseparable from the process which transformed much of US agriculture into transnational agribusiness, and local farming networks all over the world into consumer endpoints of a globalized food industry.

More than 20 years ago Jack Kloppenburg, a rural sociologist and long-standing advocate of farmer-generated local knowledges, wrote that 'agricultural science as currently constituted provides neither a complete, nor an adequate, nor even a best possible account of the sphere of agricultural production' (2009: 248). Agriculture has been reduced by agriscience to the exploitation of land through intensive monoculture farming. Oriented towards the conquest of foreign markets, agricultural production has been made to depend on mechanization, agrochemicals, and the constant replacement of improved crop varieties. A cultivar with improved disease or insect resistance performs well for a few years (typically 5-9), after which yields begin to drop, productivity is threatened by weeds or pests that have become resistant to agrochemicals, and a more promising cultivar comes to replace the previous one (Altieri 2001). In recent years, the efficiency of commercial 'inputs' has decreased and the yields of key crops have in some places been leveling off. Mainstream agroscientists believe that this is happening because the maximum yield potential of current varieties is being approached, and therefore genetic engineering must be applied to the task of redesigning crops. Critics of agriscience, however, argue that such a solution would would only make things wors, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri 2001). It is well-known today that chemical-intensive monoculture farming has everywhere led to soil erosion, water pollution and numerous other serious damages such as the loss of plant and animal species, the destruction of natural pest control mechanisms, the consequent proliferation of new pests and 'super weeds', and global warming. While contemporary biotechnolgy is being promoted by some as the only rational solution to both food security and environmental disaster, many point out that in a form of capitalism dominated by intellectual property rights it will most likely elevate input costs for small and medium-scale farmers to such an extent that the amount of energy they invest will constantly threaten to surpass the energy they harvest. Such a situation will in turn favor further concentration of agribusiness in the hands of a few transnational corporations.

Since the 1960s, activists and academics have increasingly denounced the link between hegemonic forms of science and the social and environmental destruction caused by industrial capitalism. As Kloppenburg states, 'the agricultural sector provides a uniquely appropriate concrete terrain for the testing of a whole range of theoretical propositions' and for 'the necessary work of developing and elaborating the here-and-now prefigurative norms of what might one day be a transformed science' (2009: 261). Feminists, social researchers of science and technology, poststructuralist anthropologists, and increasing numbers of life scientists have shown, in a number of ways, how modern agriscience has involved a neglect of physical, biological, political and social contexts, and an alienation of subjects from the intimacy of their labor processes (Kloppenburg, 2009: 254). Of particular interest here is the critical work which has explicitly positioned the biopolitical paradigm of industrial agriculture not first and foremost as an economic kind of imperialism, but more profoundly as an epistemic and culturally specific kind of imperialism. In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist Arturo Escobar emphasizes the role of unjustified assumptions regarding Western science, progress and the economy, particularly as they were mobilized during the Green Revolution by 'a father/savior talking with selfless condescension to a child/native' (1995: 159). He refers to Norman Borlaug, the American crop scientist that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, who proudly asserted that agricultural science had been able to displace 'an attitude of despair and apathy that permeated the entire social fabric of these countries only a few years ago' (158). In Escobar's analysis, Bourlaug's patronizing judgement reflects the complex social fact that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, have been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.