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2015-08-21T03:11:13Z
<p>Investigarte: /* Gabriela Méndez Cota Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture */</p>
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<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 [http://geneticroulettemovie.com/seeds-of-freedom/ 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that [http://pdn.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=271790&_user=911038&_pii=S0016718502000891&_check=y&_origin=browseVolIssue&_zone=rslt_list_item&_coverDate=2003-05-31&wchp=dGLbVBA-zSkzV&md5=f2f308f9cce9079e712e4d5de0c0dc56&pid=1-s2.0-S0016718502000891-main.pdf life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation]' (Cooper, 2008: 19; also McAfee, 2003). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debt form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, [http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=277222&jid=JSP&volumeId=33&issueId=01&aid=198425&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S0047279403007244 like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic system, nor is it a sort of deterministic program] (Clarke, 2004). The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, [http://sautiyawakulima.net/oaxaca/about.php?l=0 those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor ]on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/20/coffee-geeks-growers-climate-change-harvest-hipster the tropical farmer deserves attention today]. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/resources/open_access_information_sources.html an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production] (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/fileadmin/www.cropwildrelatives.org/documents/Origin%20and%20diversity%20of%20maize.pdf new alliances between scientific communities and social movements]. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is being transformed as a result of many decades of external and internal challenges. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.&nbsp;Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Clarke, J. (2004) 'Dissolving the Public Realm? The Logics and Limits of Neoliberalism', ''Journal of Social Policy, ''33 (1): 27-48. <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Astrobiology/Introduction&diff=5739
Astrobiology/Introduction
2014-10-21T17:11:24Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Astrobiology Back to the book] <br> <br />
<br />
= Sarah Kember<br> '''Introduction: What Is Life?''' =<br />
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<br> I’m not going to answer this question. In fact, I doubt if it will ever be possible to give a full answer. (Haldane, 1949: 58) <br><br> '''What Is Life?''' <br><br> J. B. S. Haldane (1949) and Erwin Schrödinger (1944), two of the twentieth century’s most influential scientists, posed the direct question, ‘what is life?’ and declared that it was a question unlikely to find an answer. Life, they suggested, might exceed the ability of science to represent it and even though the sciences of biology, physics and chemistry might usefully describe life’s structures, systems and processes, those sciences should not seek to reduce it to the sum of its parts. While Schrödinger drew attention to the physical structure of living matter, including especially the cell, Haldane asserted that ‘what is common to life is the chemical events’ (1949: 59) and so therefore life might be defined, though not reduced, to ‘a pattern of chemical processes’ (62) involving the use of oxygen, enzymes and so on. <br><br> Following Schrödinger and Haldane, Chris McKay’s article, published in 2004 and included in this collection, asks again ‘What is Life – and How Do We Search For It in Other Worlds?’. For him, the still open and unresolved question of life is intrinsically linked to the problem of how to find it (here, or elsewhere) since, he queries, how can we search for something that we cannot adequately define? It should be noted that this dilemma did not deter the founders of Artificial Life, a project that succeeded Artificial Intelligence and that sought to both simulate ‘life-as-we-know-it’ and synthesise ‘life-as-it-could-be’ by reducing life to the informational and therefore computational criteria of self-organisation, self-replication, evolution, autonomy and emergence (Langton, 1996: 40; Kember, 2003). McKay concedes that certain characteristics of life, such as metabolism and motion, can occur without biology, but rather than pursuing contestable (re)definitions of life that could not, for him, constitute the basis for a search, he prefers to ask a more pragmatic question: ‘what does life need?’. The elements that support life – energy, carbon, liquid water, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus – are not contested and, barring only liquid water, they are abundant in the Solar System. It seems logical then, McKay argues, to search for life indirectly, by looking at where the water is. The case for liquid water on Mars has, as we will see, a long and argumentative history. In as far as the current case is, as McKay maintains, ‘tight’, then there is justification for his upbeat assessment that, with the correct instruments, it should be possible to find life-as-we-know-it – and even life-as-it-could-be. He writes: ‘while it could be similar at the top (ecological) and bottom (chemical) levels, life on Mars could be quite alien in the middle, in the realm of biochemistry’ (2004: 1261). <br><br> The tone of Zhuralev and Avetisovs’ (2006) article on ‘The definition of life in the context of its origin’ is somewhat downbeat in comparison with McKay’s. Life is too complex and diverse to define, they argue, and our understanding of it is poor. They offer a very useful overview of historical variations in the definition of life, ranging from Darwin’s sense of life as a system that evolves by means of natural selection to more recent informational and ecological definitions. What is interesting about their argument – aside from a critical philosophical inclination that is often lacking elsewhere – is the extent to which they reject the view of life as information; a view that has characterised the technosciences since the discovery of DNA in the 1950s and that is derived, they suggest, from Shannon and Weavers’ post-war Information Theory. As a defining characteristic of life, information is ‘often reduced to storage and the expression of genetic information' (2006: 281). Yet, for Zhuralev and Avetisov, information is likely to be far more complex than this. However, a more complex account of information as a factor of biological processes, structures and states is not currently available. I have argued elsewhere (2003) that the informational approach to life has long been contested within biology and computer science. In ''The Darwin Wars'' (1999), for example, Andrew Brown contrasts information-based genetic determinism (Richard Dawkin’s view of life as the expression of our selfish genes) with the argument that the fundamental unit of life is in fact not the gene, but rather the individual organism – albeit one that receives and feeds back information to its own internal environment, and to the external one too. If the always contestable view of life as a (cybernetic) information processing system is, to an extent, unavoidable for Zhuralev and Avetisov, their own attempt at a contingent description puts information into play with the materiality that Shannon and Weaver sought to elide (Hayles, 1999). Combining states with processes, it undermines the autonomy of both the individual agent/organism and the abstract informational or ecological system within which such an agent/organism supposedly resides. <br><br> '''From Exo- to Astrobiology''' <br><br> If ideas about complexity, heterogeneity and even relationality arise in Zhuralev and Avetisovs’ ‘doomed’ quest for an adequate definition of life, they are notably absent in the fields of exobiology and astrobiology, which connect the question of life with the problem of finding it ‘out there’. Exobiology and astrobiology are effectively synonyms, but Stefan Helmreich explains how and when (in 1998) astrobiology ‘became a favoured designation for the study of cosmic biology when NASA founded its Astrobiology Institute’ (2006: 68). On its webpage, NASA defines astrobiology as ‘the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe’. It is further described as a multidisciplinary field that encompasses ‘the search for habitable environments in our Solar System and habitable planets outside our Solar System’ as well as ‘the search for evidence of prebiotic chemistry and life on Mars and other bodies in our Solar System, laboratory and field research into the origins and early evolution of life on Earth, and studies of the potential for life to adapt to challenges on Earth and in space’ (http://astrobiology.nasa.gov). This definition encompasses the recent study of extremophiles, or organisms that live in environments previously considered uninhabitable due to extreme temperature, lack of oxygen and so on. It hints at the possibilities of terraforming – of recreating human societies on other planets, including Mars – and has, at its core, the long-held assumption of an analogy between Earth and Mars. <br><br> The analogy between Earth and Mars is explored at length in Percival Lowell’s books on Mars, spanning the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century, and included in this living book because of their widely acknowledged influence on the development of exo- and astrobiology, and, indeed, due to their direct relation to nineteenth- and twentieth century science-fiction (Markley, 2005). In ''The War of the Worlds'', published just a few years after Lowell’s ''Mars'', H.G. Wells refers to the nebular hypothesis, a theory of planetary formation initially suggested by Immanuel Kant and Pierre Simon Laplace that is the basis of Lowell’s argument for the existence of intelligent life on Mars. The nebular hypothesis maintains that planets were formed by condensed gas rings emitted from the Sun. The rate of cooling and subsequent habitability of the planets was determined by their respective size and distance from the Sun. Since Mars is both smaller than Earth and further from the Sun, it is, according to this hypothesis, ‘older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course’ (Wells, 1898: 1-2). For Lowell and Wells, the basis of the analogy between Earth and Mars is not simply that the two planets are neighbours, but that one is an older and therefore more evolved version of the other. It is, at this stage, a temporal analogy, which, through subsequent debates, observations and explorations of Mars – particularly in the 1960s – becomes also a spatial analogy. The latter is premised on the opposition of Earth and Mars as, respectively, the blue planet and the red planet (that is, when viewed from space); the live planet and the dead one. It is my contention that this doppelgänger phase of the relation between Earth and Mars is nearing its end – an end signalled by Gilbert Levin’s findings in the Viking Labelled Release experiment of 1976 and accelerated by the confirmation of Lowell’s concerns about the sustainability of life on Earth. The two articles included here from the journal ''Sustainability ''demonstrate, I suggest, a continued allegiance to Lowell’s thinking and a return to the earlier temporal analogy in which Mars stands, once again, for the future of life on Earth. <br><br> Astrobiology’s analogies are of course premised on a belief in the autonomy of Earth and Mars, humans and aliens, and in their subsequent ability to interact with each other. The notion of panspermia – i.e., meteor-bound microbes travelling between planets and linking their respective origins and evolution – underlies astrobiology, as does the representationalism that allows a life form to be substituted or evidenced by its biochemical signature. Representationalism, as Karen Barad (2007) suggests, is premised on the autonomy of the thing and its trace; an autonomy which allows for the latter to be (as it were, by itself) more or less reliable, more or less accurate in its description of an object or being whose absence is therefore made present. In his article, ‘The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination’, Helmreich reminds us that for Derrida (in ‘Signature Event Context’) the representational link is broken and that the signature has, in effect, no signer. Helmreich writes: ‘the signature of life can exist only insofar as life itself is a replicable absence, a metaphysical quality we know when we don’t see it’ (2006: 73). Life itself, for Foucault, is precisely a metaphysical quality – it is not only a construct but a kind of construct that did not even exist before the end of the eighteenth century. In the transition from natural history to biology and from the study of living beings to the study of life itself there is, Foucault suggests, a process of splitting and separation in which life and being become exterior to each other. Life, he argues, ‘on the confines of being, is what is exterior to it and also, at the same time, what manifests itself within it’ (1997: 264). The idea of life as an inexhaustible force which passes through but surpasses being informs the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson (1998). It is significant in this context that life for Bergson, associated as it is more with processes than states, more with becoming than being, remains resolutely unrepresentable. <br><br> Biosignatures are generated by biochemical processes such as the acquisition and conversion of energy, and are sought in the chemical ingredients, and even in the elements needed for life, notably water – but also, more recently, sulphur and methane. Drawing on the work of Hillel Schwartz, Helmreich considers the ‘de-signs’ or, to use Derrida’s terms, ‘dissentions’ – the internal revolutions – at play within astrobiology (Helmreich, 2006: 75; Derrida, 1978: 38). He asks: ‘Within the biosignatures astrobiologists employ – or, better, ''design ''– as evidence for life, do there lurk logics of de-sign? That is, having installed a representational system for detecting direct and remote signs of life, might astrobiologists also be curving away from this system, from these signs?’ (76). The signs of de-sign exist, for example, in the recognition of the limitations of terrestrial analogies for extraterrestrial life, in the acknowledged but necessary reduction of life to its states, structures and processes and in contestations over visual evidence and the interpretation of data. Astrobiology’s internal revolutions are what make and unmake the field. They extend from Lowell to Levin and beyond, and they incorporate key events such as the claim, in 1996, that a team led by David McKay ‘had discovered traces of biogenic materials and possibly of fossil microorganisms within ALH84001, a 1.9kg meteorite of Martian origin’ (Taylor, 2001: 3). The Mariner 4 flyby of 1964 had dealt ‘the final blow to the concept of Mars as an Earth-like and potentially life-bearing world’. Although the Martian meteorite demonstrated the continued desire for extant life of Mars, it revealed, at best, extinct life (13). The fossilised organisms onboard the meteorite were more virus-sized than bacterial and therefore a little short of qualifying as life forms. It was also suggested that the microbe-like structures were ‘more likely to be artefacts arising from the preparation of fractured crystalline materials for examination by stereoscan electron-microscopy’ (4). <br><br> The history of astrobiology is entangled with the history of technologies, from telescopes to microscopes via photography and spectrography. Although the trajectory from Lowell’s observatory in Flagstaff Arizona to the onboard cameras of Spirit and Opportunity (NASA’s robots, roving Mars since 2004) has involved moving ever closer to the object in question (life on Mars, past or present), the history of Mars technology has not been one of unquestioned progress, since the object has never been successfully disentangled from its mode of observation. The de-signs of astrobiology are more marked than those of other sciences because its object is ultimately elusive and its methods so variable. In his paper addressing historical perspectives on the question of life on Mars, Taylor shows how, between the late nineteenth century and the early twenty-first century, the ‘pendulum of scientific opinion’ swung from the claim that there must be intelligent life on Mars, to the claim that there was no life at all, back to the possibility of microbial life, albeit in the past (2001: 14). This pendulum dynamic followed the use of different diagnostic instruments. The technological and contextual contingency of scientific claims extends, of course, to the design and execution of experiments – including, especially, the Viking experiments of the 1970s as one of the most contested of all. Viking 1 landed on Mars in 1976. It contained three different experiments designed to search for biochemical signatures ‘consistent with the presence of life’ (15). Robert Markley, in his comprehensive study of the science and culture of the ''Dying Planet'', maintains that each experiment was limited by an unavoidable terracentrism, based on an analogy between life on Earth and life on Mars which defines and constrains both the popular and scientific imagination. He argues that the principal investigators ‘acknowledged that they were operating from terrestrial expectations about how alien microbes might respond to water, nutrients, heat and light’ and that their experiments ‘encoded different views about how such hypothesized life might metabolize nutrients and respond to environmental stimuli’ (2005: 244). Taylor adds to this the perhaps contentious note that ‘prior to the actual spacecraft landings, the opinions of the three individuals responsible for each of the active-biology experiments ranged from optimism regarding the discovery of life (Gilbert Levin), a cautious 50/50 chance expectation (Vince Oyama), to complete pessimism (Norman Horowitz)’. Not only were their views largely unchanged once the data was analysed, he maintains, ‘they have remained unchanged right down to the present day’ (15). <br><br> Within the broad field of astrobiology, both analogical and representational reasoning are continually designed, de-signed and – as we will see by following the trajectory of both Lowell and Levins’ work – re-designed. The question that remains, and may always remain, pertains to the possibility of extant or even extinct life on Mars that is sufficiently disentangled from extant (or even extinct) knowledge and preconception; techniques, technologies and values characteristic of life here on Earth. If alien life is truly alien, how do we recognise it? These questions, I suggest, become clearer if we switch registers from science to philosophy, or at least relinquish, rather than attempt to recover, the designs of representation and the presumed autonomies that underline analogical thought. However, two recent articles from the journal ''Sustainability ''show that these designs are far from relinquished and, indeed, as I indicated earlier, take us back to nineteenth century analogical thought in which the futures of Earth and Mars are intertwined. Pabulo Henrique Rampelotto’s article considers what the continued ‘discovery’ (presuming as this term does the disentanglement of object from its mode of observation) of terran extremophiles offers to the field of astrobiology – which, in short, is the hope of extant life on Mars. Microbes, he maintains, ‘can return to life even after hundreds of millions of years’ and so there is the possibility, given that Mars once had an environment like ours, that ‘life could have survived and adapted to the subsurface conditions’ (2010: 1609). If life can be found under a rock in the Atacama desert, then why, Rampelotto asks, can’t it be found on Mars? The list of known extremophiles is exhausting (thermophiles, psychrophiles, halophiles, acidophiles, alkaliphiles….) but not exhaustive. Life is just not as sensitive as we once thought. It can do without light and even oxygen – though not, as Lowell always said, without water. <br><br> If Rampelotto’s article looks from Earth toward Mars – an ageing planet that Lowell said was populated by a superior race of nevertheless doomed and dying Martians – Seth Baum’s contribution to ''Sustainability'', and to this collection, returns the gaze and asks: ‘Is Humanity Doomed?’. Happily, he believes that our fate is not so certain. Baum does not share the environmental determinism that drove Lowell’s theory of planetology, and he is equivocal about Lowell’s sense of Mars as a prophet, ‘foretelling our future’ (Lowell, 1908: 111). Planetology is Lowell’s attempt to reconcile the nebular hypothesis with Darwin’s theory of evolution. He argues, in ''Mars as the Abode of Life'', that there are six stages to a planet’s evolution, taking it from birth to death. Earth is at stage 4 (terraqueous), while Mars is at stage 5 (terrestrial – the ‘oceans have departed’) and the Moon is dead at stage 6 (1908: 11). By virtue of being older than Earth in evolutionary terms, Mars indicates a future already foretold in the ‘expansion of Earth’s deserts’ (135) – and, I might add, in the melting of its polar ice-caps. Environmental determinism may drive the ‘Goldilocks principle’ of astrobiology (the idea of habitable zones that are ‘just right’ for life), but Baum suggests that it is undermined by insights gleaned from extremophiles on Earth. He ponders the Fermi paradox – which suggests that logically, mathematically, there should be alien life in abundance even though we have, arguably, failed to detect it – and eschews Eschatology, or end of the world scenarios such as the impact event(s) that did for the dinosaurs. True, he says, our Sun will one day collapse, but since other disasters (for example, climate and ecological ones) are far more imminent, the question of sustainability remains valid – and, indeed, vital. Since sustainability, for Baum, is a fundamentally ethical (as much as environmental) issue (see also Braidotti, 2006) that might enable humans to avoid the fate of Lowell’s Martians – who are doomed, despite their canal-building efforts, to drying out – his conclusions are surprising. As if Lowell had morphed into Wells in his imagination, Baum suggests that our efforts to render our planet sustainable are only a means of buying time, ‘so that future generations can colonize space’ (2010: 600). Like Well’s Martian invaders – driven from their own planet to colonize and consume the inhabitants of Earth – it looks likely that we may have to move out after all. <br><br> '''Mars and Martians'''<br><br> The pairings that structure the chapters in this book are analogues or doubles. They contain texts that appear to be autonomous but are, I suggest, co-constitutive of each other, even as the boundary cuts are made between science and fiction, Earth and Mars, humans and aliens. Cuts, according to Barad: ‘cut ‘things’ together and apart’ (2007: 179). She adds that ‘what lies on the other side of the agential cut is not separate from us’ (393) and therefore the challenge, ethically, is not how we do or don’t, should or shouldn’t respond to radical alterity, but rather, what is the degree to which we are prepared to recognise our entanglement with others – with the alien as the ultimate other, with Mars as a planet that co-evolves with Earth in the Solar System. If the human condition is one of becoming-with aliens (as well as technologies, animals and so on) and the condition of Earth is one of becoming-with Mars (among other objects in the Solar System), we retain, according to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, a psychological tendency (which for me is also strongly cultural) to deny, or at least to defer, the recognition of our connectivity with seemingly exterior entities. Klein (1988) writes about the early development of infants, and about the anxiety that can be generated by separation – from the Mother as the original object of love and hate – and the frustration of bodily needs. That anxiety produces what she calls the paranoid/schizoid tendency, whereby good and bad feelings about the object are externalised, split and projected onto it. The object thereby becomes persecutory, and the subject becomes paranoid. Although the development process is by no means linear, it is not until those mixed feelings are synthesised internally that the infant moves into the phase of depressive anxiety, or greater psychic realism. There are, I suggest, many cultural manifestations, perhaps particular to the West (and its tendency, as Levi Strauss [1978] maintains, to think in binary oppositions), of our arrested, or at least non-linear development. Not least of these is our relation to Mars and Martians – a relation from which, it seems to me, we have endured a difficult separation, and through which we act out, in science as in the imagination, the frustration of our bodily-environmental needs. Indeed, our relation to Mars and Martians is, to say the least, a highly anxious one. Where – in fantasies of terraforming, or of intelligent and heroic canal-building aliens – it is clear that we idealise the planet and its inhabitants (from whom we may or may not have originated, and into whom we may or may not evolve), it is also apparent that we fear the sort of persecution that so far only our species has been proven to conduct. This, of course, is the subtext of ''War of the Worlds'', which exemplifies and exposes the paranoid projections of Western cultural imperialism, embodying them in monstrous, destructive, vampiric Martian-machines. On a note of pure speculation, I cannot help but wonder if a relatively stable era or phase of psychic realism will not be achieved until or unless we find – dead or alive – the first Martian microbe whose existence is not disputed and which is, if not strictly analogous, then at least related to our own. Our relationality with aliens, in other words, may need to be spelled out. <br><br> In the meantime splitting remains the sign of anxious agential connection. It is the bio/psycho/cultural signature of human-alien, co-dependent and co-constitutive life forms that may remain forever unrepresentable (or absent, in Derrida’s sense), but that are nevertheless becoming (in Bergson’s sense). Which is to say that human-aliens exist (as I argue in the epilogue) more ''as ''time than ''in ''space. Time, for Bergson (1998), is a synonym for movement, duration, creative evolution – and life itself. Human-aliens are a facet of what Barad (2007) refers to as the dynamic intra-actions of entities that appear separate and merely interactive. Bergson, before her, insisted that our eyes deceive us, and that we see only states, not processes. For me, these dynamic intra-actions also connect science and fiction; Percival Lowell and his detractors, such as Alfred Russell Wallace, without whom Lowell would not have written his later work; and also Gilbert Levin and his NASA-backed detractors, who have contributed to keeping alive a claim (of some 35 years and counting) that Mars is both habitable and inhabited. The pairing of texts in this living book as either analogues or doubles is therefore ironic, although it does demonstrate the pendulum dynamic of debates on Mars, and the extent to which these are structured by a dispute over the nature of scientific knowledge and, specifically, the relation between observation and deduction, and between data and interpretation. Debates on Mars and Martians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century do not simply contribute to the production of science-fiction, I maintain, but rather generate within themselves fictional and narrative tropes. They are stories involving compelling, un/reliable narrators; strong and sometimes obsessive characters; antagonism; a sense of crisis and a quest for resolution (see McKee [1999] for an outline of the characteristics of story-telling). What is more, although other commentators, such as Markley (2005), have shown the extent to which scientific debates remain porous, and are literally in-formed by the knowledge, technologies and values of their time, I would want to go further. In this book, I incorporate texts that span the interval from 1895 to 2011: I include, among others, the pairing of Lowell’s ''Mars ''with Wells’ ''War of the Worlds''; Lowell’s ''Mars and Its Canals ''with Wallace’s ''Is Mars Habitable?'', and Lowell’s ''Mars as the Abode of Life ''with Levin’s most recent update of his landmark piece, co-authored with Patricia Ann Straat and entitled ‘Life on Mars? The Viking Labeled Release Experiment’ (included here as ‘The Labeled Release Experiment – Past and Future’). In doing this, I seek to reflect and enact not so much the porosity of science with relation to the social, but first of all the production of a technoscientific culture of inextricable fact and fiction, in which aliens always already exist. <br><br> I will not offer a summary of Lowell’s books beyond the points that have already been highlighted; those that will be mentioned in the next section of the introduction concern method and the disputed nature of scientific knowledge. It is precisely in the protracted self-defence of his science of Mars and Martians that Lowell establishes himself as an un/reliable narrator and an increasingly obsessive character, engaged in an antagonistic debate whose narrative crisis appears at the end of ''Mars ''and is resolved thirteen years later, at the end of ''Mars as the Abode of Life''. The crisis, outlined by Lowell, and extended by Wells, concerns not so much the existence of beings on Mars, or even the biological, chemical and physical characteristics of Martian life itself. As Lowell puts it: ‘That Mars seems to be inhabited is not the last, but the first word on the subject. More important than the mere fact of the existence of living beings there, is the question of what they may be like’ (1895: 211). The crisis, then, concerns the character of the Martians; one that Lowell tends to idealise as superior in intelligence to us and more egalitarian (the canals spread across the entire planet to the benefit of all, and not just of those living in the relatively terraqueous poles), while Wells demonises it as excessively imperialist. Between them, they cover the spectrum of what Klein calls the paranoid/schizoid phase, in which anxiety (about the primary object) is felt as a fear of annihilation. Lowell foretells the annihilation of life on Earth as the planet moves inexorably through the evolutionary phases of its development. His books are, among other things, a series of projections in which the fate of Earth and Earthlings is played on Mars and Martians. This intelligent and socially-minded race of superior beings is doomed and dying. The crisis – and the tension – is resolved by his conclusion, at the end of his writing, that very soon this race will be dead. For Wells, the crisis of annihilating invaders is resolved by means of an annihilating invasion: the Martians are killed off by alien-human bacteria. <br><br> In recent decades, the scientific imagination has been organised around the prospect of Martians as- rather than Martians-with microbes. In this respect, the work of Gilbert Levin stands out as both a successor to that of Percival Lowell (maintaining, against a concerted and powerful opposition, the case for extant life) and as the clearest and most consistent articulation of a position towards which the pendulum of scientific opinion is swinging – albeit despite itself – as Mars begins, once again, to look habitable. In ‘The Labeled Release Experiment – Past and Future’ (written in 2011 and published here for the first time), he offers a retrospective analysis of the data and contested interpretations of his original findings in the 1970s. Then, in his paper with Straat, Levin concluded that although his findings were consistent with life, it was possible that ‘non-terrestrial soil chemistry may be mimicking a biological response’ (1977). His interpretation was cautious, he suggests in retrospect, ‘because of the great significance of finding extraterrestrial life’ (2011: 10). However, subsequent to the other two Viking experiments conducted by Oyama and Horowitz, it became the basis of the dominant view, sanctioned within the scientific community as a whole. Taylor offers a summary of the labeled release, gas exchange and carbon assimilation experiments, all designed to detect metabolic activity using different methods. While ‘Levin and Oyama’s experiments sought to detect life by the decomposition of organic nutrients into gas during metabolism’, Horowitz’s experiment ‘was based on an initial synthesis of organic matter that would incorporate the labelled atmospheric gases supplied’ (2001: 15). Even though, according to Taylor, two out of the three experiments ‘appeared to indicate a positive result’ for biological activity, doubts arose concerning the existence of organic molecules on Mars and, prior to NASA ending its biological experimentation programme in 1977, the general opinion was that the results were either non-biological, or simply too ambiguous (15). For Levin, this ambiguity called for further controls and experiments, which he continues to conduct and design to this day. His aim, still, is to eliminate the possibility of a non-biological interpretation of the Viking data – that, he maintains, was never in itself contested. ‘The disagreement’, he writes, ‘is about the interpretation – for life or not – of the data’ (2011: 2). <br><br> Looking back over decades of disagreement, Levin now argues that, since his experiment ‘satisfied the pre-mission criteria for the discovery of microbial life’, there should have been an official follow-up, instead of which NASA and ESA merely presumed that the reaction generated by the labelled release experiment ‘was caused by a strong oxidant in the surface material of Mars’ (2). Since, for him, an interpretation based on the presence of oxidants is inconsistent with the data, and, having reviewed this in the light of subsequent research on extremophiles and the Martian environment, Levin is able to conclude that not only is it ‘more difficult to imagine a sterile Mars than a live one’, but that he did indeed find life (24). In a context in which the Goldilocks principle of habitats that are just right for life has been reassessed as a – perhaps – more Kleinian, depressive principle of not ideal but ''good enough'', Levin is able to argue that it is now ‘extremely difficult to deny that liquid water in amounts sufficient for microbial activity exists at the Viking landing sites and over broad areas of Mars’ (18). The ‘concept of Mars as a habitat’ has indeed ‘changed radically’; in effect, it has changed back from Wallace’s claim that it is dry, uninhabitable and uninhabited to Lowell’s claim that, although it is caught in an inevitable dialectic with death, there is, after all, life on Mars (18). <br><br> '''Aliens Between Fact and Fiction – As If!''' <br><br> From H. G. Wells (1898) to Orson Welles (1938), and from ''The Greening of Mars ''(1984) to ''District 9 ''(2009), there has been a tradition of writing about Mars and Martians that hovers between fact and fiction, presenting stories as if they were documents of events. Looking back at my own work, the concept of ‘as if’ has been associated with metaphor and the creation of associations between unlike entities, such as humans and machines, monsters or, indeed, aliens (Kember, 1998). Recently, however, I have revised my interpretation and associated the ‘as if’ concept more with metamorphosis than metaphor, and with the becomings attendant upon connections that always already exist (Kember, 2011). This interpretation is more consistent with Foucault (1997) – and, following him, with Braidotti’s (2002) sense of the potentiality of between-space, as well as with Haraway (2008) and then Barad’s (2007) reading of the intra-actions between companion species. I want to insist then on the companionate relationality not only of humans and aliens but of fact and fiction, of story and document. Being dynamic and processual, such relationality precludes the possibility of representationalism, and therefore of maintaining a division between truth and illusion. <br><br> Without relinquishing its claim to representational realism, one of the many interesting things about Lowell’s work is the extent to which – by virtue of its extraordinary conclusions, and its proximity in time and tone with a major work of fiction – it explores the boundary of truth and illusion and, what’s more, pushes science toward an edge with art and (emerging) media that is policed, increasingly, in the name of ethics. Boundary work, as more contemporary science story-tellers such as Haraway and Barad maintain, highlights ethics ''not ''as right response, but as recognition and responsibility toward the constitutive other. For Lowell, the constitutive other of science is philosophy and the constitutive other of the scientist is the sketch-artist and the photographer. In the Preface to''Mars and its Canals'', Lowell writes, in response to his as-yet unnamed detractors within the scientific community, that: ‘Formulae are the anaesthetics of thought, not its stimulants; and to make anyone think is far better worthwhile than cramming him with ill-considered, and therefore indigestible learning’ (1906: ix). Along with this propensity to make people think, he defends his method, namely a ‘systematic study’ of Mars, conducted while using ‘a small instrument, in good air’ and producing many hundreds of sketches and drawings, a number of which are reproduced in his books as evidence for canals – and therefore intelligent life – on Mars (1895: v). The chain of evidence that leads from a pencil sketch to an alien species is, he claims, a logical deduction, strengthened by the intervention of photography in 1905. This, involving the use of a colour screen amongst various other refinements, was able to reproduce what Lowell already saw, including some canals, some seas and even ‘a snowfall’ (1906: 275). Photography, for Lowell, was personified as a reliable, trustworthy observer, albeit one limited in ability. It could offer a recording ‘after the fact’, meaning after the conjunction of draftsman/sketch-artist, instrument and logical deduction – all of which added up to the ethics of ‘seeing well’ (274, 195). It is Lowell himself as the first observer (after Schiaparelli) of the canals, as the discoverer of life on Mars, who embodies the ethics of seeing well. This, in turn, enables him to explore the boundary between truth and illusion with such confidence that he presents his work as proof that ‘what reads like fiction is all the more wonderful for being fact’ (196). Lowell’s long reach over subsequent debates extends, I would suggest, to his assertion – and denial – of a connection between humans and aliens, fact and fiction, that de-centres ‘us’, that discomforted the conservatives of his day and that continues to enable later science story-tellers to do much the same. <br><br> My last pair of analogue-opposites consists of the equally fantastic ''Sounds of Earth'' and ''Scrambles of Earth. Sounds of Earth'' is the golden, interstellar record placed aboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 and designed by NASA to represent human life aurally to who ever or whatever might be out there to receive it. ''Scrambles of Earth'' is this same record remixed by extraterrestrials and recorded (the CD is available on Amazon) on behalf of SETI-X (the Search for Extraterrestrial Life in Exile), a dissident off-shoot of the better known organisation. SETI-X suggest that this recording is ‘rather at odds’ with the anthropological and technological aspects of the original project, which offers, in retrospect, ‘incomplete recording information for much of the disc’s non-Western music – with credit and copyright often given to those European and American ethnomusicologists who recorded “Pygmy Girls” and “Navajo Indians”, while the names of Bach, Mozart and Stravinsky stand as tokens of unitary authorship and putatively universal genius’ (http://earthscramble.com/). The alien remix is, according to SETI-X, implicitly critical of the original’s Eurocentrism, and evinces almost total non-compliance with standard record speed (one rotation every 3.6 seconds), the distinction between sound and noise, copyright laws and so on. It seems to me – although this could very easily be a facet of my own preconceptions – that ''Scrambles of Earth'' does not display the same desire to represent alien life aurally. Rather, what we have here is evidence of de-sign or dissent; an overturning from within which suggests that our extraterrestrial companions do not consider themselves to be altogether other. <br><br> '''Postscript''' <br><br> In lieu of an end-point or conclusion to this long introduction, I would like to offer a brief postscript, which serves to reiterate my argument that debates on astrobiology and the quest for life on Mars are analogical, antagonistic and ultimately circular. In a recent article entitled ‘Media, Mars and Metamorphosis’, I discussed a remarkable open access electronic book edited by Jeremy Hoyle and concerning, amongst others, a microbiologist named Lou (surname withheld for legal purposes). Lou had designed an experiment, conducted thus far in secret, to test for microbial life on Mars. It is reasonable, I think, to deduce that the experiment was carried and performed by one of the Mars rovers – either Spirit or Opportunity. We know for a fact that the ill-fated Beagle 2 did include biological experiments and, with Levin, I find that NASA’s apparent reluctance to pursue life experiments literally beggars belief. Since Spirit has been stuck in a sand-trap for some time, there would certainly have been ample opportunity for this robot to conduct, for example, probe experiments into the sub-soil where liquid water is likely to be found, at least at certain times of the year. Lou, interviewed by Hoyle, and, having been fired by NASA and effectively released from his confidentiality agreement, claims to have discovered microbial life in a form fundamentally similar to that of green sulphur bacteria which form in aggregates around unicellular organisms – in this case, resembling E. Coli. After Levin and Lowell before him, Lou submitted his findings to peer review, but was received with scepticism and ultimately humiliated. He was driven to take extreme measures to vindicate himself, and he reveals to Hoyle that he ingested the microbe so that he himself would come to embody alien life. Hoyle is dismissive, and readers of this volume may discover for themselves just how dearly his conservatism cost him (Kember, 2010). That is not what I am reporting here, however. Rather, I have been asked to give notice of Lou’s intention (he is no longer speaking to Hoyle) to conduct a follow-up experiment – on himself. This will be an experiment designed to test for the presence of hybrid human-alien cells. I do not know, at this stage, whether or not they are green, but I am assured that evidence will be provided in the form of sketches and photographs as well as, of course, biochemical signatures. As it is the duty of the scientist to offer a taxonomy of life-forms, so it is the privilege of those who discover new life-forms to name them. Although Lou is still in the process of choosing a name, I can reveal that among those currently receiving his consideration is the ''Clathratiforme Lowevinyte'', in homage, it would seem, to those who have influenced him and his field most profoundly. <br><br><br> '''References''' <br><br> Allaby, M. &amp; Lovelock, J. (1984) ''The Greening of Mars''. London: Andre Deutsch. <br><br> Barad, K. (2007) ''Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and The Entanglement of Matter and Meaning''. Durham and London: Duke University Press. <br><br> Bergson, H. (1998) [1911] ''Creative Evolution''. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc. <br>http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/skins/common/images/button_italic.png <br><br> Braidotti, R. (2002) ''Metamorphoses''. Cambridge: Polity Press. <br><br> Braidotti, R. (2006) ''Transpositions''. Cambridge: Polity Press. <br><br> Brown, A. (1999) ''The Darwin Wars''. London: Simon and Schuster <br><br> Derrida, J. (1978) ''Writing and Difference''. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. <br><br> District 9, Dir. N. Blomkamp (2009) <br><br> Foucault, M. (1997) ''The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.'' London and New York: Routledge. <br><br> Haldane, J. B. S. (1949) ''What is Life?'' London: Lindsay Drummond. <br><br> Haraway, D. J. (2008) ''When Species Meet''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. <br><br> Hayles, N. K. (1999) ''How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics''. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. <br><br> Helmreich, S. (2006) ‘The Signature of Life: Designing the Astrobiological Imagination’, ''Grey Room'' 23, 66-95. <br><br> Kember, S. (1998) ''Virtual Anxiety: Photography, Technology and Subjectivity''. Manchester: Manchester University Press. <br><br> Kember, S. (2003) ''Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life.'' London and New York: Routledge. <br><br> Kember, S. (2010) ‘Media, Mars and Metamorphosis’, ''Culture Machine'', Vol. 11. <br><br> Kember, S. (2011) ‘No Humans Allowed? The Alien in/as Feminist Theory’, ''Feminist Theory'' 12 (2), 183-199. <br><br> Klein, M. (1988) ''Envy and Gratitude and Other Works.'' London: Virago. <br><br> Langton, C. (1996) ‘Artificial Life’ in M. Boden (ed.), T''he Philosophy of Artificial Life''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <br><br> Levi Strauss, C. (1978) ''Myth and Meaning''. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. <br><br> Levin, G. V. and Straat, P. A. (1977) ‘Life on Mars? The Viking Labeled Release Experiment’, ''Biosystems'', 9, 165-174. <br><br> Markley, R. (2005) Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination. Durham and London: Duke University Press. <br><br> McKee, R.(1999) ''Story: Substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting''. London: Methuen. <br><br> Schrödinger, E. (1944) ''What is Life?'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <br><br> Taylor, Richard, L. S. (2001) ‘Life on Mars – An Historical Perspective’, in J. A. Hiscox (ed.), ''The Search for Life on Mars'', A Publication of The British Interplanetary Society. <br><br> Welles, O. (1938) ‘“The War of the Worlds” by H. G. Wells’, Columbia Broadcasting System, http://members.aol.com/jeff1070/script.html</div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=5672
Agriculture/Introduction
2014-04-20T23:02:22Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
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<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 [http://geneticroulettemovie.com/seeds-of-freedom/ 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
<br />
<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that [http://pdn.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=271790&_user=911038&_pii=S0016718502000891&_check=y&_origin=browseVolIssue&_zone=rslt_list_item&_coverDate=2003-05-31&wchp=dGLbVBA-zSkzV&md5=f2f308f9cce9079e712e4d5de0c0dc56&pid=1-s2.0-S0016718502000891-main.pdf life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation]' (Cooper, 2008: 19; also McAfee, 2003). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
<br />
<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, [http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=277222&jid=JSP&volumeId=33&issueId=01&aid=198425&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S0047279403007244 like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic system, nor is it a sort of deterministic program] (Clarke, 2004). The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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<br />
The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
<br />
<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, [http://sautiyawakulima.net/oaxaca/about.php?l=0 those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor ]on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
<br />
<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/20/coffee-geeks-growers-climate-change-harvest-hipster the tropical farmer deserves attention today]. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/resources/open_access_information_sources.html an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production] (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/fileadmin/www.cropwildrelatives.org/documents/Origin%20and%20diversity%20of%20maize.pdf new alliances between scientific communities and social movements]. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is being transformed as a result of many decades of external and internal challenges. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.&nbsp;Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Clarke, J. (2004) 'Dissolving the Public Realm? The Logics and Limits of Neoliberalism', ''Journal of Social Policy, ''33 (1): 27-48. <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html <br />
<br />
Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' ''The Militant'', 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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McAfee, K. (2003) 'Neoliberalism on the molecular scale. Economic and genetic reductionism in biotechnology battles', ''Geoforum, ''34 (2): 203-219. <br />
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Link: http://pdn.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&amp;_cid=271790&amp;_user=911038&amp;_pii=S0016718502000891&amp;_check=y&amp;_origin=browseVolIssue&amp;_zone=rslt_list_item&amp;_coverDate=2003-05-31&amp;wchp=dGLbVBA-zSkzV&amp;md5=f2f308f9cce9079e712e4d5de0c0dc56&amp;pid=1-s2.0-S0016718502000891-main.pdf <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
<br />
http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br> <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
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User:Investigarte
2014-04-20T22:55:01Z
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<div>Gabriela's academic writing has addressed issues of science and technology from the perspective of deconstructive philosophy and cultural studies. She recently obtained her PhD in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, with a thesis on the cultural politics of Mexican debates around agricultural biotechnology (http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/9918/). Gabriela is currently teaching undergraduate courses on epistemology, art and ecological thinking at Universidad de las Americas-Puebla and the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City. She also works as a freelance academic consultant for public and private educational institutions in Mexico, such as the Centro Nacional de las Artes and 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos (www.17edu.org). In addition, Gabriela is editing the 15th volume of Culture Machine Online Journal (www.culturemachine.net).</div>
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Agriculture/Introduction
2013-05-16T14:18:16Z
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<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 [http://geneticroulettemovie.com/seeds-of-freedom/ 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that [http://pdn.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=271790&_user=911038&_pii=S0016718502000891&_check=y&_origin=browseVolIssue&_zone=rslt_list_item&_coverDate=2003-05-31&wchp=dGLbVBA-zSkzV&md5=f2f308f9cce9079e712e4d5de0c0dc56&pid=1-s2.0-S0016718502000891-main.pdf life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation]' (Cooper, 2008: 19; also McAfee, 2003). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, [http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=277222&jid=JSP&volumeId=33&issueId=01&aid=198425&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S0047279403007244 like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic system, nor is it a sort of deterministic program] (Clarke, 2004). The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, [http://sautiyawakulima.net/oaxaca/about.php?l=0 those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor ]on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/resources/open_access_information_sources.html an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production] (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/fileadmin/www.cropwildrelatives.org/documents/Origin%20and%20diversity%20of%20maize.pdf new alliances between scientific communities and social movements]. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is being transformed as a result of many decades of external and internal challenges. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.&nbsp;Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Clarke, J. (2004) 'Dissolving the Public Realm? The Logics and Limits of Neoliberalism', ''Journal of Social Policy, ''33 (1): 27-48. <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html <br />
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Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=5248
Agriculture/Introduction
2012-11-28T11:23:59Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 [http://geneticroulettemovie.com/seeds-of-freedom/ 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
<br />
<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that [http://pdn.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=271790&_user=911038&_pii=S0016718502000891&_check=y&_origin=browseVolIssue&_zone=rslt_list_item&_coverDate=2003-05-31&wchp=dGLbVBA-zSkzV&md5=f2f308f9cce9079e712e4d5de0c0dc56&pid=1-s2.0-S0016718502000891-main.pdf life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation]' (Cooper, 2008: 19; also McAfee, 2003). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
<br />
<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, [http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=277222&jid=JSP&volumeId=33&issueId=01&aid=198425&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S0047279403007244 like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic system, nor is it a sort of deterministic program] (Clarke, 2004). The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
<br />
<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
<br />
<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/resources/open_access_information_sources.html an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production] (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/fileadmin/www.cropwildrelatives.org/documents/Origin%20and%20diversity%20of%20maize.pdf new alliances between scientific communities and social movements]. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is being transformed as a result of many decades of external and internal challenges. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.&nbsp;Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Clarke, J. (2004) 'Dissolving the Public Realm? The Logics and Limits of Neoliberalism', ''Journal of Social Policy, ''33 (1): 27-48.<br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html <br />
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Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' ''The Militant'', 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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McAfee, K. (2003) 'Neoliberalism on the molecular scale. Economic and genetic reductionism in biotechnology battles', ''Geoforum, ''34 (2): 203-219. <br />
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Link: http://pdn.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&amp;_cid=271790&amp;_user=911038&amp;_pii=S0016718502000891&amp;_check=y&amp;_origin=browseVolIssue&amp;_zone=rslt_list_item&amp;_coverDate=2003-05-31&amp;wchp=dGLbVBA-zSkzV&amp;md5=f2f308f9cce9079e712e4d5de0c0dc56&amp;pid=1-s2.0-S0016718502000891-main.pdf <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=5247
Agriculture/Introduction
2012-11-28T11:20:56Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
<br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 [http://geneticroulettemovie.com/seeds-of-freedom/ 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that [http://pdn.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=271790&_user=911038&_pii=S0016718502000891&_check=y&_origin=browseVolIssue&_zone=rslt_list_item&_coverDate=2003-05-31&wchp=dGLbVBA-zSkzV&md5=f2f308f9cce9079e712e4d5de0c0dc56&pid=1-s2.0-S0016718502000891-main.pdf life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation]' (Cooper, 2008: 19; also McAfee, 2003). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, [http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=277222&jid=JSP&volumeId=33&issueId=01&aid=198425&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S0047279403007244 like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic system, nor is it a sort of deterministic program] (Clarke, 2004). The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/resources/open_access_information_sources.html an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production] (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/fileadmin/www.cropwildrelatives.org/documents/Origin%20and%20diversity%20of%20maize.pdf new alliances between scientific communities and social movements]. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is being transformed as a result of many decades of external and internal challenges. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.&nbsp;Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html <br />
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Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=5213
Agriculture/Introduction
2012-10-10T10:59:12Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 [http://geneticroulettemovie.com/seeds-of-freedom/ 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that [http://pdn.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=271790&_user=911038&_pii=S0016718502000891&_check=y&_origin=browseVolIssue&_zone=rslt_list_item&_coverDate=2003-05-31&wchp=dGLbVBA-zSkzV&md5=f2f308f9cce9079e712e4d5de0c0dc56&pid=1-s2.0-S0016718502000891-main.pdf life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation]' (Cooper, 2008: 19; also McAfee, 2003). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
<br />
<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ***<br> <br> <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/resources/open_access_information_sources.html an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production] (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/fileadmin/www.cropwildrelatives.org/documents/Origin%20and%20diversity%20of%20maize.pdf new alliances between scientific communities and social movements]. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is being transformed as a result of many decades of external and internal challenges. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.&nbsp;Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html <br />
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Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' ''The Militant'', 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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McAfee, K. (2003) 'Neoliberalism on the molecular scale. Economic and genetic reductionism in biotechnology battles', ''Geoforum, ''34 (2): 203-219.<br />
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Link: http://pdn.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&amp;_cid=271790&amp;_user=911038&amp;_pii=S0016718502000891&amp;_check=y&amp;_origin=browseVolIssue&amp;_zone=rslt_list_item&amp;_coverDate=2003-05-31&amp;wchp=dGLbVBA-zSkzV&amp;md5=f2f308f9cce9079e712e4d5de0c0dc56&amp;pid=1-s2.0-S0016718502000891-main.pdf<br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br> <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=5212
Agriculture/Introduction
2012-10-10T10:54:16Z
<p>Investigarte: /* Gabriela Méndez Cota Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture */</p>
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<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 [http://geneticroulettemovie.com/seeds-of-freedom/ 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that [http://pdn.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=271790&_user=911038&_pii=S0016718502000891&_check=y&_origin=browseVolIssue&_zone=rslt_list_item&_coverDate=2003-05-31&wchp=dGLbVBA-zSkzV&md5=f2f308f9cce9079e712e4d5de0c0dc56&pid=1-s2.0-S0016718502000891-main.pdf life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation]' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/resources/open_access_information_sources.html an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production] (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/fileadmin/www.cropwildrelatives.org/documents/Origin%20and%20diversity%20of%20maize.pdf new alliances between scientific communities and social movements]. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is being transformed as a result of many decades of external and internal challenges. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.&nbsp;Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extinction/Introduction&diff=5211
Extinction/Introduction
2012-10-03T17:59:00Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Extinction Back to the book] <br> <br />
<br />
= Claire Colebrook /<br> '''Introduction: Extinction. Framing the End of the Species''' =<br />
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<br> <br />
<br />
== '''Introduction''' ==<br />
<br />
Scientific events have their own consistency and it is often a mistake for humanities scholars to reduce such complexities to ‘worldviews’ or the history of ideas. To pass from quantum uncertainty to postmodern literary styles reduces the disciplinary specificity of scientific discovery and functions, and risks presenting literature and culture as reflections or contexts for scientific facts. Yet it is also the case that certain scientific events do not occur as facts within history but rather open up a new experience and possibility of history, and a new way in which the very relation between history and science might be considered. When Darwin posited that the human species had a beginning within the history of life, this was not only a fact about ‘our’ history; it also opened up formal problems for the imagination: how could our understanding of the human and the humanities proceed with a sense of the processes of life beyond human time? History is no longer a human narrative, and human narratives themselves seem to incorporate forces that are no longer human – from Thomas Hardy’s cosmic irony to modernism’s sense of atavism and the genesis of human life from hearts of darkness. Genuine scientific events provide a richness for aesthetic practice (especially if we consider how the possibility of a world without humans has opened up new genres of post-apocalyptic film and literature, and if we note Victorian poetry’s capacity to approach something like sound itself that would intone beyond human meaning). But events are two-sided and allow as much for humanizing re-inscription as they do for disturbances of our already-ordered modes of comprehension. <br><br> The concept of evolution and the temporality it brings in train opens new horizons for knowledge – not just new facts but also ways of approaching the world of facts. If evolution is a concept, it is so in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense: it is both a function (or a way of thinking about processes of the world from an inhuman point of view) and a concept that reorients the entire terrain of thinking, requiring us to have new figures of the human, new figures of life, new relations among life and perception, and even new understandings of what would count as thinking (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994). The conceptual possibilities of evolution are dampened if they are folded around the human point of view. If we see life as functional, oriented towards our types of complexity and order, and inevitably leading towards the types of complexity exemplified by humans, then we miss the decentering randomness and rogue temporalities of evolutionary processes. It is perhaps too easy to look back on social Darwinism and think that we are now so much more sophisticated in our assimilation of Darwinian time into human time. But I would suggest that this is not so, and that the uses of Darwin today – especially in what has come to be known as ‘literary Darwinism’ – actually have the effect of reducing the force not only of Darwinism but of another temporal event, extinction: not only have we humanized the emergence of humans from deep time (by regarding evolution as being oriented towards adaptation), but we have also domesticated the sense of the human end. I would refer to this as a reaction formation: precisely as the multiple threats to our species intensify, we affirm various modes of ‘post-humanism’ that deny the specific scars human beings have inscribed on the planet (as though we could simply abandon the destructiveness of our species and become one with a connected, ecological and creative world). Maturana and Varela’s theories of embodied cognition are gaining increasing currency, positing that there is no such thing as mind that is not already embodied and emergent from the world (even though all the evidence of anthropogenic destructions suggests that we have successfully closed ourselves off from all sense of connectedness). Perhaps the most astounding modes of this reaction take the form of seeming incorporations of Darwinism: cognitive archaeology, to name but one example, will assert that human formations as abstract as modernist art have their origin in the organism’s functional capacity to organize perceptions for the sake of survival. The essays on extinction in this volume – essays that evidence an increasingly destructive, world-disturbing and distinctly human force, along with a complexity that precludes any simple narrative or single causality – suggest that however the human species has evolved, there can be no question that function, survival and fitness tell only part of the story of life processes. Claims such as the following are typical of what has come to be known as ‘literary Darwinism’:<br><br> <br />
<blockquote>To qualify as Darwinist, a reading would have to bring all its particular observations into line with basic evolutionary principles: survival, re- production, kinship (inclusive fitness), basic social dynamics, and the reproductive cycle that gives shape to human life and organizes the most intimate relations of family. While retaining a sense of the constraining force of underlying biological realities, literary Darwinism would also have to emulate the chief merit of Foucauldian cultural critique—its understanding that the forms of cultural representation are highly variable, that these variations subserve social and political interests, and that every variation has its own specific imaginative quality. (Carroll, 2010: 59)</blockquote> <br />
<br>Never mind that Darwinism would require a commitment to forces of random mutation that would not necessarily lead to ‘survival, re- production, kinship (inclusive fitness), basic social dynamics, and the reproductive cycle that gives shape to human life and organizes the most intimate relations of family’; never mind that science after Darwin has emphasized processes that go beyond human survival, the family and the organism (including molecular evolution and sexual selection); and never mind that Foucault’s entire oeuvre was critical of interests as the focus of politics (precisely because of discursive and material forces that could not be reduced to intent or surviving life). What requires response in this summation of what ‘qualifies’ as Darwinism is this seeming concession of science to the unique nature of ‘imaginative quality.’ It is as though science provides function and interests, while literary form then breaths life into these purposed by bestowing some special aesthetic sheen. Science yields facts while the humanities trade in the effects and packaging of those facts: what this approach does not allow is any sense of positive feedback. Perhaps more complex narrative modes and understandings of temporality allow for different modes of inquiry, and perhaps scientific inquiry of those broader temporalities opens new structures of literary form that cannot be reduced to ‘imaginative quality.’ The humanities have increasingly responded to Darwinian evolution in a humanizing manner that has reached crisis point today: either it was deemed that the creativity of human life yielded a specific and irreducible wonder of cultural evolution – so that some exception might be made for humans within life – or, as is more common today, evolution is used as a figure to explain morality, politics, language, art and technology, all as conducive to the furtherance of the human organism. And yet other signs exist, beyond all the domesticating uses of Darwin, of deep formal ruptures, of which Darwinism was but one expression. <br><br> Not only did imaginative horizons and forms transform to include deeper times and histories beyond those of human agency, so that it became possible to see language, culture and history as possessing a force beyond purpose and intent; new styles of question were posed. Darwin’s vision of human emergence was not a fact absorbed by human time but opened a new figure of time. On the one hand Darwinism enabled science to expand a theological humanism – with life now becoming a wondrous panorama generating complexity and grandeur beyond the limits of ‘man’; on the other hand, a new mode of viewing life and time was required that would no longer privilege the contingent point of view of the human (Indeed, as Nick Bostrom’s work (following Carter and Leslie) on the ‘doomsday’ version of the anthropic principle indicates, a calculation of the probability of any single human point of view would suggest that if there is a species with a distinct temporal phase then I must conclude that it is more likely that I would exist at the point of that phase when humans are the most numerous (Bostrom 2001).) It follows then that for any calculating human observer the chances are that I exist at the end of time and that it is illogical to assume that life will necessarily extend beyond me, infinitely in grand panorama of creation, if any individual point of view is, statistically, more probably located at the end of time (when there would be the greatest number of humans). The same anthropic principle that would lead me to conclude, statistically, that I am placed at the final point of history when humans are most numerous has another, positive, articulation. Given that I exist in a complex universe of living forms with human evolution, cultural and technological development continuing and proliferating, does it make sense to assume that complex life is highly improbable or do I imagine so many possible and different worlds that ultimately my complex existence would be close to inevitable? Statistically, from my own point of view and focusing on probability, the same anthropic reasoning that would make it rational to expect that I’m in the last phases of human evolution would also prompt me to infer that human life cannot be that improbable, given that it actually exists, and so it’s more likely that there are very many worlds that would, eventually, have produced something like complex life. What such anthropic reasoning suggests is that the human point of view, at least statistically, is at once always oriented towards doomsday and always more likely to be located in a vast panorama of possibilities, of which its own actuality would be but one form. In terms of evolution, we can move from the calculation of probabilities from the human point of view to the inhuman point of view of deep time: here, too, the existence of the human species in time appears as fleeting, exceptional and as a fragment of an inhuman spectrum of possibilities. <br><br> The concept or figure of evolution has two sides: evolution has been thoroughly humanized, allowing ‘man’ to see all his technical extensions (from writing to morality) as adaptive extensions of his organic and self-serving life; but a broader view of evolution allows a temporality of extinction in which no life-form can be considered normative, necessary or particularly worthy. This ‘double vision’ (in which life at once seems to open its temporal horizon for human viewing and yet also extends beyond human comprehension) cannot be isolated as they way in which a certain individual (Darwin) or a certain science pictured the future: with the thought of a time from which the human species emerged, for something altered more generally in the modes and possibilities of knowledge. Just as extinction events occur both as single catastrophes and as pulses (Benton), so thought events occur as shifts in the very relation between thinking and what is thought, and in additional ruptures. Darwinism was a thought event that placed humanity within time, but the pulse of extinction awareness that is coming to the fore in the twenty-first century adds the sense of an ending to the broader awareness of the historical emergence of the human species. <br><br> From the nineteenth century onwards novels began to consider human actions as having some space within a deeper time of life of which humans were epiphenomena. Well before Darwin put forward the scientific concept of evolution, Mary Shelley’s novels, ''Frankenstein'' and ''The Last Man'', imagined life as a process from which humanity emerged, a life which also might extend beyond humans. Marx also articulated a broader notion of human ‘species being’ which could not be reduced to interests or decisions. It is possible to see Darwin as an articulation of a broader shift in which humanity grasps a sense of ‘man’ as a being who is at once determined by life processes but whose social and cultural being will constitute the modes in which those processes are lived: something like a concept of ‘life’ as a general force of which ‘man’ is a specific determination come to the fore. For Michel Foucault the concept of ‘life’ is not one concept among others, but is intertwined uniquely with a strangely double sense of ‘man’ and time. ‘Man’ recognizes himself as an effect of a deep time, which he can only know after the event of cultural, linguistic and social formations. ‘Man’ generated new modes of knowledge, such as the social sciences in which the human species was deemed to be explicable according to a life that explained ‘man’s’ distinction (language and culture) but grounded that distinguishing history in a more general logic of life. For Foucault, the human sciences such as anthropology, ethnography or linguistics marked a new ‘fold’ between time and knowledge. Man was not one species among others, but recognized himself as the being who could come to know life’s temporality only as it was disclosed through culture and language. Further, there was a shift from morality, or the assertion of what counts as the good, to ethics, encapsulated in the following question: how does one legitimate the law one gives to oneself? There is a split between the scientific knowledge of facts or what is, and what ought to be, or the law humans create for themselves. This distinction relies on the separation of something like life from the way in which life is formed and rendered meaningful. (Today, with evolutionary science being deployed to explain moral systems, aesthetic values and economic decision-making we can note two distinct moves: first, there is a distinct field of life processes that orient the human organism towards adaptation, and then there are various cultural systems through which this life is expressed. For Foucault, this leads to bio-politics and normalization: for now there is something like life which can act as the ground for other systems. We speak, socialize, paint, sing, educate, and form ourselves in terms of one logic of life.) In the absence of normativity, or the straightforward assertion of a moral system, one is left with normalization; it is now life (and increasingly bio-political life) that orients enquiry. Life provides the ground or locus for moral-political questions. How might we educate, house, socialize, represent, rehabilitate, reproduce or manage humans to maximize life? It is no surprise that sub-disciplines, such as bio-ethics or applied philosophy, have started to create bridges between philosophical questions and policy: for such linkages or ‘applications’ are required only when something like life appears as a separate object with its specific normality. We can then ask whether it is legitimate to intervene in, enhance, extend or manufacture life. <br><br> For Foucault, the discovery of ‘life’ as a process that could provide the ground for negotiating certain questions regarding man marked the period and temporality that he referred to as modernity. Looking beyond man and modernity, Foucault suggested that if we could think of the ways in which language operated against organic and historically developing life then we might exit the normalization of man and approach new types of questions. Commenting on this aspect of Foucault’s work, Gilles Deleuze argued that ‘life’ too – as well as language – could be considered beyond the normalizing notions of the organism, especially the organic figure of man. This is especially worth considering today, at a time when there has been a plethora of studies explaining morality, visual art, language, music, literature and even seeming pathologies such as over-spending and over-eating by referring back to some notion of species-serving adaptive evolution. But this possibility of thinking life beyond purposive striving might also give us pause when considering what new knowledge formations the concept of life might require in the twenty-first century. <br><br> If, as many humanities scholars have noted, the Darwinian thought of a time beyond humanity – with man as a species existing within an evolving life – required new forms of narrative and different ‘folds’ between ‘man’ and the life of which he was an expression, the new sciences of extinction and catastrophe should not simply add information or data to our ways of thinking about human life, but rather should require entirely new forms of discipline and relations among disciplines. Most importantly, the very concept of discipline – as a regular knowledge practice – needs to be brought in line with the increasingly apparent indiscipline of humanity and its tendency towards extinction. Broadly, one might consider this new relation between disciplines and indiscipline under the broad rubric of climate change. If one starts to research extinction, it is difficult to avoid the problem of climate change. While the human species – and all other species – face other threats of extinction (including nuclear disaster, viral pandemic, global terrorism and systemic collapse), climate change has become the icon of the thorough event of extinction. This is almost certainly because climate change both discloses the non-survival temporalities of human evolution (or all the ways in which we have evolved to shorten the time span of different species, including our own), at the same time as climate change can refer to a whole swathe of intensifying disaster horizons. It is not only the meteorological climate that is changing: global catastrophic risks are being disclosed at a number of levels. Some of these risks have always been present and are becoming discernible; others have intensified, both because of meteorological climate change, but also because political, economic, cultural and epistemological climates have altered. Many of these threats intertwine and are over-determined: an elevation in global temperature may enable diseases to flourish in previously incompatible environments, but infectious diseases also have a greater chance of traveling to new zones given the increased global network of travel (which of course itself adds to increased carbon emissions and further temperature elevations) (Shuman, 2010; Greer, Ng and Fisman, 2008). More significantly still, globalism is not just an economic phenomenon that renders the world financial system more volatile and conducive to catastrophe, and not just a political problem that intensifies terrorist energies; it is also a new event in the scientific imaginary that is perhaps best thought of by broadening the sense of climate. Climate (derived from the sense of a surface or region of inhabitation, from the Greek ''klima'') allows us to grant attention to our milieu. If the nineteenth-century and Darwinism opened up a sense of man as a species within a broader line of inhuman time, then a strange counter-fold has occurred with space: ‘man’ becomes an animal of a delimited time – now capable of imagining his end – and this because he inhabits a climate that he at once marks geologically and that is a limited and waning resource. To say, as geologists are now doing, that we are having such an effect on the planet that human existence – after extinction -- will be readable in terms of geological scars, is also to say that we must add to man’s expansion of temporal point of view that occurred with evolution a spatial contraction that has occurred with climate change and the various extinction scenarios it brings in train. <br><br> The ‘discovery’ of climate change needs to be considered as an epochal event: it does not simply occur within time but, like the Darwinian positing of a time before humans, it also opens up a time after humans and an end-time that humans themselves will be able to witness precisely as they contribute to its acceleration. (We can think of the phenomenological sense of ‘epoche’ here: if we ‘bracket’ the world, and view it no longer as ours, no longer familiar or meaningful, then the world appears as a delimited world from which there would be other possible worlds.) But if Darwinian evolution expanded the horizons of life and the human – allowing us to think of our species as one creative fragment of an ever-creative whole, climate change and the possibilities of extinction it brings in train alter the very notion of a scientific event. <br><br> First, today, we are not only reading the past genealogically – asking how, from the present, current conditions of life must have emerged. The possibilities of thinking about extinction, rates of extinction, accelerations of extinction and human contributions to extinction demand that our ways of thinking about past extinction events must be applied to the present, at the same time as an unprecedented intensification of anthropogenic destruction must alter our modes and disciplines of calculation of the future. One of the great problems of climate change in its broadest sense is modeling, with our approach to the future being intensive. It is not as though the past gives us a trajectory from which we might read the future as an ongoing extension; just as our use of fossil fuels consumes a past and pollutes a future, so our greater knowledge of the past and the volatility of the planet requires ever more nuanced models for the future. If we want to calculate the rate of human extinction (extinctions caused by humans, as well as the possibility of humans themselves becoming extinct) then factors about human prediction themselves come into play. On the one hand our increasing awareness of environmental destruction might prompt us to act. On the other hand the very extent of catastrophic possibility and the sorts of knowledge that extend beyond any individual grasp tend to lead to inaction. It is as though what is facing extinction is not only the human species but also a certain mastery or image of the species (the species sense of its mastery and its capacity to master itself): climate change is not only change of the climate but a change in the very way in which we think about climates and rates and modes of change. Extinction is not only extinction of the species but also an extinguishing of the human animal’s sense of humanity. Part of predicting rates of extinction requires predicting how humans respond to threats of extinction; part of managing and predicting climate change requires dealing with denial, inertia and an increasingly complex field of knowledge that precludes the very certain and decisive action that the ‘situation’ demands. There is no discipline of climate change (given the multiple factors) nor, similarly, could there be any such discipline of extinction studies. The new modes of asking questions about life occur in a volatile present where what we are reading and its potentiality for change, and the speeds and modes with which it might change are constantly shifting. <br><br> The Darwinian thought of the genesis of life was already a multiple problem, for evolutionary thought has to consider variations of multiple strata of life; an organism does not adapt to its environment, for there is variability from which something like bodies and milieus emerge (Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, 2010). This problem of multiple times, scales, strata and causalities is exacerbated by the dawn of extinction awareness. Thinking the end of life takes ‘us’ beyond any single domain of the life sciences and any straightforward notion of interdisciplinarity. There is a volatility of knowledge, predictions, disciplines and the imagination in which – for example – something like the denial of climate change might be a survival mechanism (allowing us to live here and now, not overly concerned with complexities of a too-distant future); alternatively, the very mechanism of survival – of striving to live on – might push ‘us’ to a threshold in which the absence of life becomes an imminent and immanent possibility. <br><br> Second, the scientific event of extinction and the relation it bears to a broader sense of climate change and species destruction need to be both narrowed and expanded. The broader concept and possibility of extinction – that life’s creative mutability also generates the destruction of living forms – can be discerned in both smaller and larger scales. Two concepts seem to mark ‘our’ current position within history as epochal: first, humans are beginning to imagine the next great extinction event – which is to say that this will be the first time that extinction has been imagined. It is as though the layers of our geological past yield a possibility (of extinction) from which we might regard a future that is not a future for us, and a future in which all the ways in which we have mapped time and history will be absent. For even our current conceptions of deep time – a time beyond human histories – have emerged from a present reading of our own past. What we now imagine, from this reading of the past, gives us a sign not only of our end within time, but also of the fact that we will ourselves have altered our place in time. <br><br> With geologists suggesting that we might be on the brink of a major extinction event, this time caused not by external factors but by one of the earth’s own species, it might be time for the humanities and other disciplines to ask the question of extinction, and to take seriously the very notion of the humanities and discipline. In this living book I have collected some of the more readable or assimilable materials about extinction, but a glance at the field shows both that there is no field (because catastrophic scenarios can be envisioned variously according to whether one focuses on carbon, methane, nuclear weapons and even probability theory), and that from various points of view the work of these fields becomes increasingly unreadable. Certainly, if one accepts one of the notions of knowledge and the humanities – that the striving for truth is a mode of adaptiveness – then we would avoid the stark evidence that technoscientific practice has led to extension and destructiveness of life. Rather than celebrating or affirming a post-human world, where man no longer deludes himself with regard to his primacy or distinction, and rather than asserting the joyous truth of ecology where life is finally understood as one vast, self-furthering interconnected organic whole, we should perhaps take note of the violent distinction of the human. For some time now, humans have been proclaiming their capacity to render themselves figurally extinct. All those claims for man’s specialness, for the distinction of reason, for human exceptionalism have given way to claims for unity, mindfulness, the global brain and a general ecology. Alongside the actual threat that humans pose in terms of contributing to an envisaged sixth wave of extinction, we are witnessing a virtual or imagined extinction. Humans have started to imagine that they are no longer really separate from an earth, which they now regard less as an object and more as their adjacent milieu. This is the first positive sense of extinction: it as is though the only way in which ‘we’ will see life survive is if we remove the traditional concept of (mastering, consuming, dominating) man from the horizon. But this sense of human absence is not only delusional; it is symptomatic and psychotic. Just as all the evidence presents itself that humans are contributing markedly and irrevocably to the planet’s destruction they claim that there is nothing unavoidably distinct about human existence. It is imagined that we might overcome our history of distinction and circumvent the inevitability of widespread extinction. <br><br> Nowhere is this symptom of reaction formation more evident than in the discourse of post-humanism: precisely when man ought to be a formidable presence, precisely when we should be confronting the fact that the human species is exceptional in its distinguishing power, we affirm that there is one single, interconnected, life-affirming ecological totality. After centuries of a supposed ‘humanism,’ in which ‘man’ was deemed to have no essence other than the form that life he gave to himself, and in which man (like God) was nothing other than his pure existence, liberated from any determining essence, there seems to have been a strange double shift. On the one hand man extinguishes himself: it is declared that there really is no such thing as man, that the notion of human exceptionalism was a lie and that in truth there is one life in which all the features that had once marked the human – knowledge, emotion, linguistic capacity, altruism, mind and community – are in fact present in all life. Man is declared to be dead, to be nothing more than life itself. And life is deemed to be mindful, creative and self-organizing (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1991;Thompson, 2007). Cartesian man (the subject detached from the world who pictures and masters a world of dead matter) is diagnosed as the error of modernity from which life now saves us (Damasio, 1994; Flanagan, 2007). On the other hand, and at the same time, there is widespread evidence of the truth of Cartesianism, a truth that is intoned everywhere and yet never heard, witnessed but not recognized. In addition to anthropogenic climate change, and the proposal by geologists to mark a new era of the Anthropocene that would be readable in the earth’s layers from a post-human future, the intensity of the human extinction drive goes well beyond climactic (or distributed conditions). Localized volatilities such as viral pandemic (exacerbated by technological speeds), rogue nuclear powers, short-term resource catastrophes (oil spills and radioactive leaks), and the systemic paralysis that would preclude dealing effectively with any of these potential disasters also present extinction threats. It is now a commonplace to note that as evidence for anthropogenic climate change becomes more convincing, fewer and fewer humans allow themselves to be convinced; and we might add to this that the more numerous and intense the extinction threats appear to be, the more shrill becomes the cry that we have now become benevolently post-human. As the imminence of extinction looms large we shift into a myopic immanence, declaring the there is no life or world other than the one we know and give to ourselves. The presence of local threats – such as the 2008 economic collapse – far from awaking us from our suicidal slumbers pushes us away from geological and extra-human truths and draws us into dealing with economic timelines: we start to refer to short-cycle narrative terms such as recession or even ‘double-dip’ recession, both of which were likened to earlier events of the century (the present supposedly being possibly as serious as the great depression, which we have survived and which provides a somewhat calming precedent). The positive sense of extinction – the hailing of Cartesian man as dead and buried – is accompanied by a near psychotic foreclosure of the genuinely destructive sense of extinction. That destructive sense can be repressed or negated by being viewed extensively – that at ‘some’ point in the future ‘we’ and what we know will be extinct, as with all things that come into being and pass away. That extensive temporality, whereby the future will be a vague continuation or waning of present life feeds directly into the ways in which humans think about their own extinction (both the extinctions they inflict and the extinction that will befall them). In terms of endangered or threatened species we imagine acting somewhat less destructively, using a little less, damaging without quite so much force in order to save, for now, what ‘we’ have left. We speak about mitigation, adaptation, survival, cap and trade, and set targets that would require gradually moving towards less damage, as though the arrow of time were indeed an arrow (moving in one line), and as if this arrow’s trajectory might be slowed, if not reversed. <br><br> However, another destructive sense of extinction can be opened up from the point of view of intensive time: the future does not present itself in degrees, in terms of a certain end that is sooner or later, that can be sped up or delayed by using more or less. Nor is there a quantity – using less or emitting less – that might allow ‘us’ to calculate the rate of extinction (whether that be extinction of ourselves, our current mode of life or other lives). Rather, intensive time alters the very mode and speeds of temporality with each of its vectors: consider, again, the 2008 economic crises. These were not events that occurred within time, that we could view and calculate. Instead, our witnessing of temporal volatility – enhanced by multiple forms of media coverage and devices (such as smartphone displays of rising and crashing stocks) – intensified temporal volatility. The more the markets crashed, the more the markets crash; the more we are aware of the markets crashing, the more the markets crash, and the less capable we are of witnessing the very ‘events’ that our viewing and monitoring intensify. With those economic complexities rendering all other forms of action volatile – for we now know that one mode of terrorism would be to sabotage management and financial systems, and we know that economic crises put other ‘broader’ issues on hold. Panic becomes not so much a localized and avoidable occurrence, but a new mode of experience and time that feeds directly into the highly multiple nature of extinction. We are witnessing ever greater threats to our species and other forms of life, but the proximity of what we are witnessing not only precludes us from acting on the threat of extinction; it also renders certain supposedly human powers extinct. <br />
<br />
== '''The Anthropocene''' ==<br />
<br />
;Will Steffen <br />
:[http://www.cbmjournal.com/content/1/1/3 The Anthropocene, Global Change and Sleeping Giants: Where on Earth Are We Going?] <br />
;Jan Zalasiewicz ''et al''. <br />
:[http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/18/2/pdf/i1052-5173-18-2-4.pdf Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?] <br />
;Jan Zalasiewicz ''et al''. <br />
:[http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/services/downloadRegister/970105/Top_copy_Stratigraphy_of_the_Anthropocene_2_8_10.doc Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene] <br />
;Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams and Will Steffen <br />
:[http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es903118j The New World of the Anthropocene]<br />
<br />
<br> Even though environmental efforts to check carbon emissions have been central to pressures exerted on policy makers, and even though carbon is only one among many complex factors – with the focus on carbon perhaps allowing for other life-threatening factors to intensify unabated – carbon itself cannot be reckoned as an extensive quantity. It is not simply the case that increased carbon emissions will add, incrementally, to some overall warming of the planet. Rather, even carbon as an isolated factor operates intensively: each increase of emission alters the very way in which emissions change the environment. That is to say, what counts as the environment, or the specific system of exchanges that constitutes ‘our’ milieu, is itself altering. We cannot, then, simply come up with a number that would be the ideal point at which carbon emissions would be capped, nor calculate the temperature elevation that would be the limit beyond which environmental management would be achievable. As Will Steffen demonstrates, the emission of carbon will have complex and non-linear intensive effects: if there is an elevation in temperature then this will have an effect on soil respiration and lead to the release of more carbon; further, carbon emissions are perhaps better understood not so much as steady incremental rises than as ‘pulses’, with increased temperatures increasing the incidence of wildfires and pest outbreaks, damaging ecosystems and destroying their capacity to act as sinks for atmospheric CO2. Nor is carbon a simple evil or harm to the environment; black carbon that is stored in soils acts as a sink for emissions, but temperature rises will lead to melting permafrosts and the loss of peatlands, resulting in the release of CO2 and CH4. Carbon is not an isolated element but a cyclic quality that acts in relation to other quantities, producing specific relations. <br><br> Disturbance in temperature is but one outcome of increased carbon emissions, but once temperature is disturbed, or once ocean acidity rises because of the formation of carbonic acid, then oceans also lose their capacity to act as sinks. Considering just one element – carbon – in this cyclic and intensive manner increases the justification for thinking of our era as a geological epoch. For it is not simply the case that ‘man’ will exist as one species among others, having his day in his environment, perhaps destroying a few species along the way. Man will not only become extinct and cause species extinctions, his mode of species existence will also have environmental and geological effects. Carbon emissions, to name just one factor, do not simply damage or deplete ecosystems; they alter the temporality, volatility and relations of ecosystems – so much so that it makes sense to think of something like the Anthropocene era as a geological phenomenon. <br />
<br />
== '''Time and Discipline''' ==<br />
<br />
;K. J. Willis <br />
:[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2311423/?tool=pubmed How Can a Knowledge of the Past Help to Conserve the Future? Biodiversity Conservation and the Relevance of Long-term Ecological Studies] <br />
;Valentí Rull <br />
:[http://www.benthamscience.com/open/toecolj/articles/V003/S10001TOECOLJ/1TOECOLJ.pdf Ecology and Palaeoecology: Two Approaches, One Objective]<br />
<br />
<br> There is no shortage of climate change research networks and centres, and very little doubt that the problems faced by the human species and its relation to the future require complex interdisciplinary thinking. But is it the case that the future (and our species’ already grave impact on its own sustainability) can really be approached by connecting or joining disciplines? Do we not have to question the very mode and limit of discipline? A discipline is at once enabling – we can only have manageable knowledge practices by focusing on a field with certain methods and conventions – but those very enabling procedures will also limit what and how we know. Nowhere is this more evident than in the relation the human animal bears to imagining its own future. Most of the disciplines that make up climate change science take place within human time frames of reference, with one of the key temporal markers for modeling and decision making being the threshold of the industrial revolution. Because this is the point in our brief history when impact became significant and measurable, it makes sense that we would chart alterations from that historical point and model the future according to rates of change from the industrial revolution onwards. But this raises several problems that can be brought to light, both by considering inhuman time frames (in order to assess how we might think of acting in the wake of humans) and inhuman modes of life, especially bacterial life which, as Stephen Jay Gould and others have demonstrated, should lead us to downgrade the centrality we grant to humans and mammals in our ‘iconography of life’. <br><br> Climate change disciplines are predominantly oriented both to human dimensions of time, precisely because anthropology, economics, politics and sociology are social or human sciences, and to human notions of scale, because both social and hard sciences have to work with policy makers, who in turn deal with very short-term future times spans (often of election cycles) and alarmingly short historical vistas (usually fifty years). According to the case made for considering the paleo-ecological record, an understanding of deep time reconfigures the way in which we approach the temporality and risks of the present, especially species extinction. We can begin by comparing current rates of species extinctions with previous (non-anthropogenic) mass extinctions, and add weight not only to the notion that we are experiencing a sixth mass extinction event, but also to the notion of this current extinction wave as being an aspect of the Anthropocene epoch, where after man’s non-existence he will have left a signature that will be discernible in the fossil record. But a consideration of broader time frames illuminates not just that there are extinction events, but just what extinctions are imminent. A short time frame might lead us to focus on species with small populations, or species that are experiencing natural fluctuations as part of a very long cycle. Fossil records give some sense of natural variability and even information on the natural limits of species’ evolutionary life. Real decline that lies outwith a species’ natural temporal range would then be cause for concern and would alter the ways in which the ‘red list’ of endangered species would be calculated. <br><br> Knowledge or conjecture regarding ‘natural’ extinction timelines raises the problem of the human counterfactual: should conservation efforts be geared towards saving species that would have a much longer historical span were humans not in existence, or would awareness of the deep impact humans have already had on ecosystems not oblige us to think of conservation as oriented to a planet that is irreversibly humanized, already tipped into an Anthropocene epoch? Fossil records not only allow us to read timelines of species beyond human existence, they can also indicate that what we tend to think of as natural is already reliant on ‘human disturbance.’ Some ecosystems have developed as a result of anthropogenic changes, so that conservation cannot simply be a matter of restoring nature to some imaginary pre-industrial origin. Temporal records beyond human history also bring biodiversity decisions into sharper focus; it is not simply a question of saving threatened species, but of placing the numbers of what remains in relation to cycles of disturbance and proliferation. The ‘synanthropic history thesis’ uses records of previous anthropogenic impact to indicate which species will survive in the Anthropocene future, with it no longer being a question of simply opposing native and exotic species – for what counts as native or natural has already evolved in human-altered systems. What counts as a species; what counts as a species’ natural range, and is ‘natural’ to be defined according to Holocene, pre-human or Anthropocene times and strata? Paleo-ecological records not only enable a more nuanced approach to the present; they can render future modeling exercises more precise by examining how the planet and its species have responded to previous epochs of (non-anthropogenic) climate change. Further, if it is the case that policy decisions will need to think about what species are threatened with extinction, and how such extinctions will impact upon future biodiversity, then running prediction models in reverse, and seeing how accurately they pan out with previous extinction events enables a far more focused sense of future threats. Records from the past can be used to test models, both through backward prediction and running models in reverse. But the broader question posed by paleo-ecological inquiry opens up a new mode of future ethics: what is a species, or a ‘natural range’? As we look further into the past we can recognize not only waves of extinction, and the normality of extinction, but also the various ways in which extinction opens a niche for another ecology. Even if we accept that biodiversity is a prima facie good (which might only be possible with some neo-theological commitment to the ongoing proliferation of life), it becomes evident that a species is a temporally finite phenomenon, with a ‘natural range’ that may be shortened by human disturbance. If ecosystems have evolved with human disturbance then natural range considerations may have to adopt quite different norms of ‘nature’ (including extinction, disturbance and encroachment.) <br />
<br />
== '''Ecosystems and Biodiversity''' ==<br />
<br />
;Jeremy B. Jackson <br />
:[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/08/08/0802812105.full.pdf+html Ecological Extinction and Evolution in the Brave New Ocean] <br />
;Harold A. Mooney <br />
:[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2842713/?tool=pubmed The Ecosystem Service Chain and the Biological Diversity Crisis] <br />
;Norman Myers and Andrew H. Knoll <br />
:[http://www.pnas.org/content/98/10/5389.full The Biotic Crisis and the Future of Evolution]<br />
<br />
<br> Extinction, viewed from a non-anthropocentric perspective, and looking towards a more geological perspective aware of the exceptional and fleeting nature of mammalian life, is neither good nor evil. This is so not only because prior mass extinctions have contributed to ‘explosive evolution and diversification of surviving clades’ (Jackson), but also because those organisms that will benefit from current extinction phases may, or may not, contribute to new modes of biodiversity. (Biodiversity is also only a good considered from the point of human life, which requires current ecosystem services in order to ensure its own survival, but that – too – is a relative and fleeting value once considered from the point of view of deep time.) If we do accept, however parochially, that ocean biodiversity is a good that we seek to maintain for the sake of our own species, then we are faced with a series of problems that create yet one more instance of what Steven Gardner (2011) has referred to as the ‘perfect moral storm’. We have problems of modeling and predictability – just how soon and in what mode destruction will occur – combined with problems of responsibility (because polluting my coastline now or overfishing now will yield more benefit than ceasing such activities, especially if everyone else continues to allow run-off and depletion to occur), and these problems of knowledge and responsibility are rendered even more difficult through temporal range: as we create more and more damage the sacrifices required by each succeeding generation become more and more significant, and with less and less promise of maintaining a lifestyle that enjoys ‘ecosystem services’. The problems with even approaching a management of extinction rates in oceans bring this ‘perfect storm’ to the fore. First, there is the unclear relation between local perturbations (overfishing and pollution from run-offs) and broader climate changes affecting ocean chemistry; this results in ‘different and incongruent temporal and spatial scales.’ Added to this are the positive feedback loops, where fishing, the destruction of habitats, introduction of species and eutrophication reinforce each other. Further, in addition to the problems of disseminating the scientific arguments in a world where ‘merchants of doubt’ manufacture misleading claims about the proof of anthropogenic climate change (Oreskes and Conway, 2010), there is also the problem that data regarding various factors altering the world's oceans is often gathered for commercial purposes rather than for experimental science. It is also unclear, when dealing with extinctions in the oceans and elsewhere, just how many species there are, and how many are threatened with extinction. Extinction is not just a question of loss but also of proliferation. Eutrophication (or excessive nutrients) has led to an explosion of microbes, altering the trophic scales and destroying relations and systems rather than individual species. Some species will benefit from overfishing, especially as predatory species die away. We cannot know what will emerge in these new ecosystems. Trophic cascades (or the layers of predation) will alter, both from the loss of ‘top’ predatory species and from the increasing nutrients from run-off altering delicate ecosystems. It is not only coastal areas, suffering from over-fishing and run-off, that will create new systems; the open ocean experiences its own forms of depletion. Oceans are also affected by fishing and dredging. More generally, global warming that increases the surface temperatures of oceans inhibits nutrient-rich waters from rising, creating – in turn – a chronic oceanic El Nino effect. The general process of ocean acidification not only leads to decreased calcification, again altering ecosystems and biodiversity, but may be central to the mechanisms of the anticipated sixth great extinction event. <br />
<br />
== '''Mass Extinction''' ==<br />
<br />
;S. A. Wooldridge <br />
:[http://www.biogeosciences-discuss.net/5/2401/2008/bgd-5-2401-2008.pdf Mass Extinctions Past and Present: A Unifying Hypothesis]<br />
<br />
<br> Extinctions may have many triggers – the striking of the earth by an asteroid, volcanic activity, human disturbance – but one possibility is that various triggers lead to extinction because of one crucial factor: the enzyme urease. Whatever the trigger for extinctions there may be a unifying ‘kill-mechanism’, and the anticipated Anthropocene extinction would be no exception. We can define extinction as any reduction of biodiversity. The disappearance of species can be considered part of the ‘natural’ rhythm of life and evolution, unless there is a reduction of diversity in a geologically insignificant time period. That is, all things are finite and pass away, but what causes a relatively sudden drop in the range and system of species? If we accept the once controversial notion that the end-Cretaceous extinction event was cause by bolide impact (Alvarez, 1980), or entertain other possibilities such as massive volcanic eruptions, these remain ‘triggers’, but how is it that our planet has gone through five major extinctions, and will anything allow us to think about a sixth? What is the ‘kill mechanism’? If the last great extinction was caused by a bolide impact, how did this lead to mass extinction, and would this illuminate anything with regard to the future Anthropocene or sixth extinction? Despite diversity of life processes, urease protein sequences are similar across species. Urease allows organisms to access nitrogen for cell growth; it facilitates the biomineralisation of calcium carbonate by invertebrates and plays crucial roles in the ongoing syntheses of life. If urease is disrupted – by pH disturbance from ocean acidity – then ‘dead zones’ will result. Various external triggers (such as postulated bolide impacts or volcanic action) can create ph ocean disturbance, in turn leading to such enzymatic dead zones. Marine extinctions would result if species were not able to form shells or skeletons because of impeded mineralization. Species that did not rely on biomineralisation would survive; and species that were not so close to the ocean surface would also be likely to survive. It is not only in marine species that urease would explain why some species survive rather than others; if urease is essential for modes of plant production using seeds, then ferns (reproducing via spores) would survive. The fact that amniota – including mammals – do not require urease explains their survival after the last extinction event. Dinosaurs would have suffered because eggs would have had thinner breaking shells as a consequence of disturbed urease, or thicker shells causing suffocation. But the real significance lies in the possibility of the next extinction event: increased CO2 emissions – possibly as early as 2050 – tied to warmer temperatures and ocean ph disturbance would create a collapse of ocean productivity, leading in turn to further warming. A single enzyme, at the smallest of thresholds, tied to the past extinction events and our own mammalian emergence, may well be the ‘kill mechanism’ of the Anthropocene era. <br />
<br />
== '''Comprehending Extinction''' ==<br />
<br />
;Robert M. May <br />
:[http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1537/41.full Ecological Science and Tomorrow’s World] <br />
;Stephen Jay Gould <br />
:[http://brembs.net/gould.html The Evolution of Life on Earth] <br />
;Valentí Rull <br />
:[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2775185/ Beyond Us: Is a World Without Humans Possible?] <br />
;Sarda Sahney and Michael J. Benton <br />
:[http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/275/1636/759.full Recovery from the Most Profound Mass Extinction of All Time] <br />
;Jessica H. Whiteside ''et al''. <br />
:[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872409/pdf/pnas.1001706107.pdf?tool=pmcentrez Compound-specific Carbon Isotopes from Earth’s Largest Flood Basalt Eruptions Directly Linked to the end-Triassic Mass Extinction] <br />
;Richard J. Behl <br />
:[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076871/?tool=pmcentrez Glacial Demise and Methane's Rise] <br />
;Don N. Page <br />
:[http://arxiv.org/pdf/0907.4153v1.pdf Possible Anthropic Support for a Decaying Universe: A Cosmic Doomsday Argument]<br />
<br />
<br> In a recent television interview the climate scientist Michael Mann and the climate science journalist David Roberts (from grist.org) were discussing the problem of facing the future of climate change: not only does the science of climate change, at first glance, lack the appeal of straightforward human agonistics, there is also no real temporality (or ‘newness’) of news: the planet is still warming, sea levels are still rising, deforestation continues and policy remains hopelessly inadequate. Roberts responded to this problem by noting that the revolution required in everyday life in order to face the future ought to be a fascinating and engaging concern. Mann also contributed by suggesting that the window for ongoing survival of the human species did still exist, but that urgent attention was required. How can a topic as significant for the human species have fallen down the list of attractive media topics? One policy response has been to call for approaches to climate change that render the issues more human, more narrative in style, and even more personal: CRED (Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions) research shows that, in order for climate science information to be fully absorbed by audiences, it must be actively communicated with appropriate language, metaphor, and analogy; combined with narrative storytelling; made vivid through visual imagery and experiential scenarios; balanced with scientific information; and delivered by trusted messengers in group settings. <br><br> There is an ethical problem with any such guideline: how do ‘we’ divide the labor between those who count as scientists with expert information and power of decision, and those who need metaphor and narrative to feel the urgency of issues? Is the threat of the end of the human species sufficiently imminent to warrant an intervention of such a rhetorical nature, where scientific facts are conveyed to those who require ‘personal’ and affective modes of language? If the human species has shown itself to be both destructive and blind to its own destructiveness, is the addition of ‘communication’ to scientific warning going to be sufficient? An examination of the scientific literature suggests that what is required is less a unifying, humanizing and narrative approach, and more what Stephen Jay Gould has referred to as a new iconography of life. If one considers life non-anthropocentrically then the emergence of man, and mammalian life in general, would be a minor, contingent and unrepresentative exception to the majority of life forms, which are more typically bacterial. Rull notes that ‘our planet has been devoid of humans for almost its entire existence’ and that even if we consider humans to be a success, given their invasive and dominating power, it behooves us to begin to think of life beyond humans. <br><br> Given that we do have a parochial interest in the ongoing existence of our species, a broader sense of extinction and life beyond our own extinction would nevertheless serve us well. First, we might transform Michael Mann’s (2009) question about what counts as Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference – ‘Dangerous For Whom? – to ‘Dangerous for What?’ We know that different countries and different cultures – and different groups within cultures – experience threats to the species more or less acutely. Asking about varying degrees of urgency opens up the politics of our species and time: the longer we avoid intervention, the harsher the measures will be. But the threat to our own life opens up the question of life more generally, and of how we wish to live whatever time is left for the human species. There is so much more to our species’ destructiveness than carbon emissions, and even within carbon emissions there is so much more to assessing damage than simply calculating outputs – given the complex feedback loops. Beyond carbon and methane (Currier, 2011), a consideration of habitat destruction, alien introductions and overexploitation requires that we consider human life within a broader framework of other species’ extinction and in terms of an ecological footprint. Not only has the number of humans on the planet increased sevenfold over the past century and a half, there has been a fifty-fold increase in ecological footprint. Alongside this destructive force is the problem of knowing just what (and how many) species we actually threaten with our existence. To add to Gould’s observation that we have parochially focused attention on birds, mammals and amphibians – who attract one third of the efforts of species categorization, while comprising 1% of all known species – we can also note a vast array of threatened, unnoticed, uncategorized life beyond our purview. Our calculation of what species are threatened with extinction is altered by our slanted valuation of what species we ought to approach with taxonomic scrutiny. Our grasp of extinction rates is already anthropocentric. Even if we accept our anthropocentric bias, the extinction of other species is of serious concern – not just because of an aesthetic loss of biodiversity, but also because of quite a calculable and ongoing degradation and depletion of ‘ecosystem services.’ Indeed, the imminent extinction of species requires, according to May’s program for a science of the future, not a rendering human of climate change, but a different mode of economic calculation that would move beyond human production to include ecosystem services. This does not lead to some simple calculation that would then require effective communication and execution, but rather opens genuine questions – akin to those raised by Mann: ‘Who is the more virtuous: the average Swede living within the country’s sustainable limits or the average Egyptian with roughly one-fifth the personal EF yet exceeding the country’s sustainable capacity by a factor of three?’ (May, 2010). This, in turn, raises questions about the way in which we think about climate – for if there is such a thing as the climate then the simple notion of calculating an individual’s ecological footprint might be intensive rather than extensive (calculated justly only if the portion of space which one occupies is not measured in the same way as any other portion), and this in turn would create deeper questions about future generations and the space they occupy. If we expand productivity to include non-human agents – so that there might be some GDP equivalent that included all the necessary contributions of ecosystems we are continuing to harm – we might then be able to approach extinction of other species with a sense of life that is at once beyond human myopia, and yet more beneficial in approaching our self-interests for the future. <br><br> As we consider different modes of calculation, production and depletion, it is also worth noting a shift in human metabolic economies. According to May, pre-modern hunter-gatherer lifestyles survived by spending 0.1 of a calorie to ingest 1 calorie. Post-1900 humans, by contrast, started spending 1 calorie (though not their own) to get 1 calorie of input, with this increasing to a ratio of 10:1 today (with fossil fuels contributing the surplus). If we accept that human technology and intellectual development is an economy, whereby we invest in extended and delayed procedures for greater yield, we have to acknowledge an unsustainable parasitism; increasing human autonomy and mastery aligns with increasing human consumption of fuels, just to gain calorific load. (This does not take account of the overconsumption of those increasingly expensive calories.) We are consuming more and spending more energy that is not our own than ever before. May refers to this as ‘external energy subsidies’ that are required just to maintain the human species; with most of this subsidy load coming from fossil fuels. Noting further problems with energy distribution, such as 13 per cent of the world’s population consuming half of the world’s energy, May raises a question about adaptation that goes beyond the usual notion of simply how ‘we’ adapt. His work raises the question of whether there is any ‘we’ in general, and the additional complexity of the different temporalities of human adaptation: stable societies that can deal efficiently with commands and controls are less likely to be dynamic enough to take on the changes required. The authority required for drastic measures is at odds with the social adaptability that would allow for a new future. <br><br> Once we move beyond the parochialism of the human, noting both our destructive economy as a species and our organism-centred approach to other species that precludes us from assessing the future of human existence, we can start to approach the question of life and extinction in more speculative modes. For Gould, attention to natural selection (and a specifically functional notion of ‘fit’ traits being ‘selected for’) needs to be tempered with the forces of extinction: ‘mass extinctions wipe out substantial parts of biotas for reasons unrelated to adaptive struggles of constituent species in "normal" times between such events.’ For Gould, this extinction-attentive point of view opens inquiry onto more chaotic and random processes than those of fitness (including but not reducible to ‘spandrels’ or accidental side-effects that may later appear to be functional), and destroys a residual theologism in figures of evolution: ‘preferential evolution toward complexity,’ he argues, not only is ‘an unlikely phenomenon’ but also evidences ‘a bias inspired by parochial focus on ourselves.’ Indeed, Gould’s ‘new iconography of life’s tree’ would show that maximal diversity was reached early in life’s history, and that today’s world is dominated by fewer basic anatomies. If diversity and longevity are the criteria for life, then bacteria, not humans, are the great successes of this planet’s history. But talk of success is relative and glib, for there is no internal direction for life’s trajectory; humans are both contingent, fleeting, exceptional and at war – if we wish to survive – with life’s broader tendency towards extinction and microbial proliferation. Mass extinctions, however, are not just accelerated versions of ordinary processes of mutation; though frequent, rapid, extensive and different in effect from the coming and going of species through steady evolutionary processes, mass extinctions are genuine events. They indicate the pointless nature of life – utter contingency – from which it is occasionally the ‘weakest’ that survive. Benton refers to ‘disaster taxa’ or those beings that may not have been adapted at all to the world, but that exploited the new niches available after bolide impacts or volcanic disruptions. Strictly speaking, humans are not disaster taxa; we do require complex ecosystems for our ongoing survival. But the figure of disaster taxa might allow us to imagine a future beyond ourselves and beyond the notion that disaster for us might not be the opening of new ecologies – ecologies that might be imagined from the present in order to transform the time that remains. <br><br> References <br><br> Alvarez, L. W., Alvarez, W., Asaro, F. &amp; Michel, H. V. (1980) ‘Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction.’ ''Science'' 6 June: Vol. 208 no. 4448: 1095-1108. DOI: 10.1126/science.208.4448.1095. <br><br> Bostrom, N. (2001) ‘The Doomsday Argument, Adam &amp; Eve, UN++, and Quantum Joe.’ ''Synthese'' 127.3: 359-387. <br><br> Carroll, J. (2010) ‘Three Scenarios for Literary Darwinism.’ ''New Literary History'', 41: 53-57. <br><br> Currier, N. (2012) [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-currier/methane-in-the-twilight-z_1_b_1207619.html ‘Methane in the Twilight Zone (Second Episode).’] ''Huffington Post'' January 17. <br><br> Crutzen, P. &amp; Schwargel, C. (2011) [http://e360.yale.edu/feature/living_in_the_anthropocene_toward_a_new_global_ethos/2363/ ‘Living in the Anthropocene: Toward a New Global Ethos.’] ''Environment'' 360 <br><br> Damasio, A. R. (1994) ''Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain''. New York: Putnam. <br><br> Flanagan, O. J. (2007) ''The Really Hard Problem: Meaning In a Material World''. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. <br><br> Fodor, J. &amp; Piattelli-Palmarini, M. (2010) ''What Darwin Got Wrong''. New York&nbsp;: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. <br><br> Gardiner, S. (2011) ''A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change''. New York: Oxford University Press. <br><br> Greer, A., Ng, V. &amp; Fisman, D, (2008) [http://www.cmaj.ca/content/178/6/715.full.pdf+html ‘Climate change and infectious diseases in North America: the road ahead.’] ''CMAJ'' March 11, vol. 178 no. 6. DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.081325. <br><br> Mann, M. (2009) [http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0901303106 ‘Defining Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference’], ''PNAS'' 106.11: 4065-4066. <br><br> Oreskes, N. &amp; Conway, E. N. (2010) ''Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming''. New York: Bloomsbury Press. <br><br> Shuman, E. K. (2010) [http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMp0912931 ‘Global Climate Change and Infectious Diseases.’] ''New England Journal of Medicine''. 362: 1061-1063. <br><br> Thompson, E. (2007) ''Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind''. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. <br><br> Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. &amp; Rosch, E. (1991) ''The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience''. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.</div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=5210
Agriculture/Introduction
2012-10-03T17:43:43Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
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<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 [http://geneticroulettemovie.com/seeds-of-freedom/ 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/resources/open_access_information_sources.html an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production] (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/fileadmin/www.cropwildrelatives.org/documents/Origin%20and%20diversity%20of%20maize.pdf new alliances between scientific communities and social movements]. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is being transformed as a result of many decades of external and internal challenges. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.&nbsp;Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=5209
Agriculture/Introduction
2012-10-03T17:18:56Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 [http://geneticroulettemovie.com/seeds-of-freedom/ 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
<br />
<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ***<br> <br> <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
<br />
<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
<br />
<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide [http://www.cropwildrelatives.org/resources/open_access_information_sources.html an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production] (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is being transformed as a result of many decades of external and internal challenges. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.&nbsp;Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
<br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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<br> <br />
<br />
Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
<br />
&nbsp; <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
<br />
&nbsp; <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' ''The Militant'', 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
<br />
Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
<br />
New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
<br />
http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
<br />
Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
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Another Technoscience is Possible
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</xml><![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities <br />
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[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/ISBN_Numbers ISBN: 978-1-60785-253-7] <br />
<br />
''edited by'' [http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Agriculture/bio Gabriela Méndez Cota] __TOC__ <br />
<br />
== [http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Agriculture/Introduction '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture'''] ==<br />
<br />
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.&nbsp;[http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html The scientification of agriculture]&nbsp;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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities].&nbsp;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. [http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Agriculture/Introduction (more...)] <br />
<br />
== Readings ==<br />
<br />
;Alison G. Power&nbsp;<br />
:[http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full Ecosystem Services and Agriculture: Tradeoffs and Synergies] <br />
;Andrew K. Evers, Amanda Bambrick, Simon Lacombe, Michael C. Dougherty, Matthias Peichl, Andrew M. Gordon, Naresh V. Thevathasan, Joann Whalen and Robert L. Bradley&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.benthamscience.com/open/toasj/articles/V004/SI0047TOASJ/49TOASJ.pdf Potential Greenhouse Gas Mitigation through Temperate Tree-Based Intercropping Systems] <br />
;Vincent Thieu, Gilles Billen, Josette Garnier and Marc Benoît&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html Nitrogen Cycling in a Hypothetical Scenario of Generalised Organic Agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt Watersheds] <br />
;Acácio A. Navarrete, Fabiana S. Cannavan, Rodrigo G. Taketani and Tsiu M. Tsai&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems] <br />
;Wagner Bettiol, Raquel Ghini, José Abrahao Haddad Galvao, Marcos Antônio Vieira Ligo and Jeferson Luiz de Carvhalo Mineiro&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf Soil Organisms in Organic and Conventional Cropping Systems] <br />
;Chengyun Li, Xiahong He, Shusheng Zhu, Huiping Zhou, Yunyue Wang, Yan Li, Jing Yang, Jinxiang Fan, Jincheng Yang, Guibin Wang, Yunfu Long, Jiayou Xu, Yongsheng Tang, Gaohui Zhao, Jiangrong Yang, Lin Liu, Yan Sun, Yong Xie, Haining Wang and Youyong Zhu&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 Crop Diversity for Yield Increase] <br />
;Ricardo Antonio Marenco and Ávila Maria Bastos Santos&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf Crop Rotation Reduces Weed Competition and Increases Chlorophyll Concentration and Rice Yield] <br />
;Samuel Kilonzo Mutiga, Linnet S. Gohole and Elmada O. Auma&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432/7872 Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios] <br />
;Gregory A. Jones and Jennifer L. Gillett&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1653/0015-4040%282005%29088%5B0091%3AIWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2 Intercropping with Sunflowers to Attract Beneficial Insects in Organic Agriculture] <br />
;Cristina A. Faria, Felix L. Wäckers, Jeremy Pritchard, David A. Barrett, Ted C. J. Turlings&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600 High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests] <br />
;Andréia S. Guimaraes and José S. Mourao&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/pdf/1746-4269-2-42.pdf Management of Plant Species for Controlling Pests by Peasant Farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba State, Brazil: An Ethnoecological Approach] <br />
;Julia Quartz&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh] <br />
;Jack Kloppenburg&nbsp;<br />
:[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full Impending Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty] <br />
;Keith Aoki&nbsp;<br />
:[http://law2.fordham.edu/publications/articles/500flspub17892.pdf "Free Seeds, not Free Beer": Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture] <br />
;Derek Byerlee and Harvey Jesse Dubin&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113 Crop Improvement in the CGIAR as a Global Success Story of Open Access and International Collaboration] <br />
;Laxmi Prasad Pant and Helen Hambly-Odame&nbsp;<br />
:[http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/pant_odame_creative_commons4final2rev.pdf Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships]<br />
<br />
== [http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Agriculture/Attributions '''Attributions'''] ==<br />
<br />
== A 'Frozen' PDF Version of this Living Book ==<br />
<br />
;[http://livingbooksaboutlife.org/pdfs/bookarchive/AnotherTechnoscienceisPossible.pdf Download a 'frozen' PDF version of this book as it appeared on 7th October 2011]</div>
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Agriculture/Introduction
2012-09-16T11:41:06Z
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<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
<br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
<br />
<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 [http://geneticroulettemovie.com/seeds-of-freedom/ 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
<br />
<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> <br />
<br />
In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
<br />
<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
<br />
<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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<br />
The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
<br />
<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
<br />
<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is being transformed as a result of many decades of external and internal challenges. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.&nbsp;Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4217
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-11-14T19:46:30Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
<br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is being transformed as a result of many decades of external and internal challenges. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities.&nbsp;Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' ''The Militant'', 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br> <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4216
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-11-14T19:37:26Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand, that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for&nbsp; progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' ''The Militant'', 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4215
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-11-14T19:33:23Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp; <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). In a similar vein, Eugene Thacker has pointed out that biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ***<br> <br> <br />
<br />
The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
<br />
<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
<br />
<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
<br />
My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand, that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for&nbsp; progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4214
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-11-14T19:31:55Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
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<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000).&nbsp;<br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39).&nbsp;The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself.<br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand, that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for&nbsp; progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
<br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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&nbsp; <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' ''The Militant'', 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
<br />
New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
<br />
http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br> <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4213
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-11-14T19:27:25Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of critical interrogations of the hegemonic forms of science, it finally seems that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). Yet, a 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform while retaining its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself through a genuine dialogue with 'local knowledges'. The latter would require that science recognized its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). As Kloppenburg points out, such a recognition is needed because the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, and this is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). Which brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand, that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for&nbsp; progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4212
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-11-14T19:23:20Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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.&nbsp;At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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In his deconstructive analysis of 'rural development' discourse, anthropologist [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). Bourlaug's patronizing judgment implies that anything outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, must be seen as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality.&nbsp;In a related account, theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva]&nbsp;also emphasizes the devaluation carried out by agricultural scientists, and attributes to it the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution shared with Borlaug the ''cultural'' project of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. At the end of the day, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. Perhaps it could have been otherwise, Esteva suggests, had&nbsp;''campesinos'' not been turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). The failure of the Green Revolution was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; it was 'knowledge imperialism', a refusal 'to host the otherness of the other'.&nbsp; <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
<br />
<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ***<br> <br> <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
<br />
<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
<br />
<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand, that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for&nbsp; progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html, last accessed 27/10/2011.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' ''The Militant'', 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br> <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4211
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-11-14T18:57:48Z
<p>Investigarte: /* Gabriela Méndez Cota Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives */</p>
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<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). 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, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. As it happened, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. The worst of damages, however, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (Esteva, 1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an [http://www.cambia.org/daisy/bioforge_bioindicators/3189.html open source biology] modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand, that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for&nbsp; progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br> <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4170
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-10-27T12:18:19Z
<p>Investigarte: /* Gabriela Méndez Cota Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives */</p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
<br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). 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, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. As it happened, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. The worst of damages, however, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (Esteva, 1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
<br />
<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
<br />
<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been discursively co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. While this point is for Kloppenburg a positive, 'practical' one, I would like to emphasize the continuing importance of textual and discursive dimensions in the struggle for 'life' at the agricultural front. It is in debates around the politics of knowledge production that the sciences and humanities can most productively join forces to create the conditions for enacting principles of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. An important aspect of this 'creative' task, however, remains that of cultivating a critical attention to the ways in which the commercial logic easily slips into activist discourse, into our own discourse, and to the consequences of allowing this to be so, in each case.<br> <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand, that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, has already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for&nbsp; progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4169
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-10-27T11:38:04Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
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<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book] <br> <br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). 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, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. As it happened, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. The worst of damages, however, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (Esteva, 1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights'. As Kloppenburg points out, such a construct has been co-opted by trade and patenting laws - perhaps for the same reason that indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' have been easily framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract institutionalized processes of enclosure. In terms of a long-term strategy, Kloppenburg&nbsp;calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. Thus, for another agriculture to be possible, science and humanities scholars, [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/25/seed-swaps-biodiversity-seedy-sunday indeed the public at large] must join forces in the task of creating the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion.<br><br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand, that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for&nbsp; progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' ''The Militant'', 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4168
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-10-27T11:13:36Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book]<br />
<br><br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). 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, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. As it happened, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. The worst of damages, however, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (Esteva, 1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, as a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe, and indeed, as an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for&nbsp; progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4167
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-10-27T11:10:50Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book]<br />
<br><br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). 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, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. As it happened, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. The worst of damages, however, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (Esteva, 1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm] (Didur, 2003). Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last accessed 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', ''The Plant Cell'', 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4166
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-10-27T11:06:32Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book]<br />
<br><br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). 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, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. As it happened, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. The worst of damages, however, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (Esteva, 1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v053/53.1didur.html as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm (Didur, 2003)]. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', ''Remote Sensing'', 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', The Plant Cell, 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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Didur, J. (2003) 'Re-embodying Technoscientific Fantasies. Posthumanism, Genetically Modified Foods, and the Colonization of Life', ''Cultural Critique'' 53: 98-115. <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' The Militant, 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4165
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-10-27T11:03:29Z
<p>Investigarte: /* Gabriela Méndez Cota Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives */</p>
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<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book]<br />
<br><br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). 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, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. As it happened, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. The worst of damages, however, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (Esteva, 1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
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My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=4164
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-10-27T09:30:08Z
<p>Investigarte: /* Gabriela Méndez Cota Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives */</p>
<hr />
<div>[http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Another_Technoscience_is_Possible Back to the book]<br />
<br><br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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<br> 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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, since it would amount to an intensification of the conventional destructive paradigm (Altieri, 2001). It has become evident that chemical-intensive monoculture farming everywhere leads 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 global warming]. While contemporary biotechnology 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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). Escobar refers specifically to Norman Borlaug, the [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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). 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, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. As it happened, imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive. The worst of damages, however, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (Esteva, 1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
<br />
<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g. González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers' (2009: 255). <br />
<br />
<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practices is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). Their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
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<br> <br />
<br />
My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', Remote Sensing, 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', The Plant Cell, 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' The Militant, 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br> <br />
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Stewart, C. N. (2005) 'Open Source Agriculture', ISB News Report, December.<br>http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Attributions&diff=2755
Agriculture/Attributions
2011-09-26T12:39:54Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities'' ==<br />
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Power, A. (2010) 'Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies', ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', 365 (1554): 2959-2971. <br />
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Link: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full <br />
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Licence: Article deposited by The Royal Society in PubMedCentral to be accessed freely via EXis Open Choice under a Creative Commons licence allowing redistribution and re-use.<br><br> <br />
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Evers, A. K. Et al (2010) 'Potential Greenhouse Gas Mitigation Through Temperate Tree-Based Intercropping Systems', The Open Agriculture Journal 4: 59-57. <br />
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Link: http://www.benthamscience.com/open/toasj/articles/V004/SI0047TOASJ/49TOASJ.pdf<br>Licence: Open Access via Bentham Open. All published articles at Bentham Open are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited.<br><br> <br />
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Thieu, V.; Billen, G.; Garnier, J. &amp; Benoît, M. (2010) 'Nitrogen cycling in a hypothetical scenario of generalised organic agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt watersheds', ''Regional Environmental Change'', 11 (2): 359-370. <br />
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Link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html <br />
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Licence: © The Author(s) 2010 via a link to SpringerOpen, the new suite of fully and immediately open access journals which publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. <br />
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Navarrete, A.; Cannavan, F.; Taketani, R.; Tsai, S. (2010) 'A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems', ''Diversity'' 2 (5): 787-809.<br> Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf <br> Licence: ''Diversity'' is an open access journal published by MDPI. All articles published by MDPI are made available under an open access license worldwide immediately. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in MDPI journals, and everyone is free to re-use the published material given proper accreditation/citation of the original publication. Open access publication is supported by authors' institutes or research funding agency by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.&nbsp; <br />
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Bettiol, W. et al (2002) 'Soil organisms in organic and conventional cropping systems', ''Scientia Agricola'', 59 (3): 565-572. <br />
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Licence: The reproduction of articles published in ''Scientia Agricola'' is allowed only with citation of the source. Use of published material for commercial purposes is prohibited.&nbsp;All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which permits to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as to remix or adapt the work. <br />
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Li et al. (2009) 'Crop Diversity for Yield Increase', PLoS ONE 4(11): e8049. <br />
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Licence: © 2009 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. <br />
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Marenco, R. &amp; Bastos, M. (1999) 'Crop rotation reduces weed competition and increases chlorophyll concentration and yield of rice', ''Pesquisa Agropecuaria Brasileira'', 34 (10): 1881-1887. <br />
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Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf<br>Licence: All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which allows to share and remix the work only for non-commercial purposes.<br><br> <br />
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Mutiga, S.; Gohole, L. &amp; Auma, E. (2011) 'Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios', ''Journal of Agricultural Science'', 3 (1):22-27. <br>Link: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432<br>Licence: © Canadian Center of Science and Education. The Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE) publishes a number of journals all of which are peer reviewed, and open access for download. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License - Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) which allows to to copy, distribute and transmit, adapt and to make commercial use of the work. <br />
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Jones, G. &amp; Gillett, J. (2005) 'Intercropping with sunflowers to attract beneficial insects in organic agriculture', ''Florida Entomologist'', 88(1):91-96. 2005. <br />
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Link: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1653/0015-4040(2005)088%5B0091:IWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2 <br> Licence: The official journal of the Florida Entomological Society, Florida Entomologist is also the first journal to put its contents on the Internet in PDF format, the first life science journal to have all current and back issues on the Web with free access, the first entomological journal to allow authors to archive supplemental digital material with their articles, the first journal to be freely accessible on BioOne, a nonprofit, online aggregation of core research in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences. Usage of BioOne content is strictly limited to personal, educational, and non-commercial use. There is no copyright indication either on the article or on the Florida Entomologist website. Request for more information is being processed. <br />
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<br> <br />
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Faria et al (2007) 'High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests', PLoS ONE 2(7): e600. Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600<br>Licence: © 2007 Faria et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.<br> <br />
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Guimarães, A. &amp; Mourão, J. (2006) 'Management of plant species for controlling pests, by peasant farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba state, Brazil: an ethnoecological approach', ''Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine'', 2:42.<br>Link: http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/2/1/42<br>Licence: © 2006 Guimarães and Mourão; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.<br>This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.<br> <br />
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Quartz, J. (2010) 'Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh', ''International Journal of Technology and Development Studies'', 1&nbsp;(1): 55-92. <br />
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Link: http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf<br>Licence: The International Journal of Technology and Development Studies is a peer-reviewed and open access journal published two times a year. Creative Commons License © 2005-2011 CTC, Social Sciences Group, Wageningen University. Some rights reserved.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty', ''Journal of Agrarian Change'', Vol. 10 No. 3, July 2010, pp. 367–388.<br> Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full<br> Licence: © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Access to this article from the Journal of Agrarian Change is provided free of charge via a link to Wiley Online Library. Information about permissions was obtained from Cris Kay, editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change, and Lydia Webb, Senior Publishing Assistant at Wiley-Blackwell.<br> <br />
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Aoki, K. (2009) 'Free Seeds, Not Free Beer: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture', ''Fordham Law Review'' 77 (5) <br>Link:&nbsp;http://law2.fordham.edu/publications/articles/500flspub17892.pdf<br>Licence: This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Fordham Law School Institutional Repository. There is no copyright indication but request for more information is being processed.<br><br> <br />
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Byerlee, D., &amp; Dubin, H. (2009) 'Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration',<br>''International Journal Of The Commons'', 4(1). <br />
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Link: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113<br>Licence: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. <br> <br />
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<br>Prasad, L. &amp; Hambly-Odame, H. (2010) 'Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships', ''The Public Sector Innovation Journal'', 15 (2):<br>Link: http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/pant_odame_creative_commons4final2rev.pdf<br>Licence: © 1995-2011, Eleanor Glor, Editor-in-Chief. WAITING For a Response from the Editor-in-Chief.<br><br></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Another_Technoscience_is_Possible&diff=2754
Another Technoscience is Possible
2011-09-26T12:35:24Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
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= '''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities''' =<br />
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= edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota =<br />
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== [http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Agriculture/Introduction '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives'''] ==<br />
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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.&nbsp;[http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html The scientification of agriculture]&nbsp;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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities].&nbsp;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. [http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Agriculture/Introduction (more...)] <br />
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== <br> ==<br />
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Alison G. Power <br />
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[http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full Ecosystem Services and Agriculture: Tradeoffs and Synergies] <br />
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Andrew K. Evers, Amanda Bambrick, Simon Lacombe, Michael C. Dougherty, Matthias Peichl, Andrew M. Gordon, Naresh V. Thevathasan, <br />
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Joann Whalen and Robert L. Bradley <br />
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[http://www.benthamscience.com/open/toasj/articles/V004/SI0047TOASJ/49TOASJ.pdf Potential Greenhouse Gas Mitigation through Temperate Tree-Based Intercropping Systems <br>] <br />
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Vincent Thieu, Gilles Billen, Josette Garnier and Marc Benoît <br />
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[http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html Nitrogen Cycling in a Hypothetical Scenario of Generalised Organic Agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt Watersheds] <br />
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Acácio A. Navarrete, Fabiana S. Cannavan, Rodrigo G. Taketani and Tsiu M. Tsai <br />
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[http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems] <br />
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Wagner Bettiol, Raquel Ghini, José Abrahao Haddad Galvao, Marcos Antônio Vieira Ligo and Jeferson Luiz de Carvhalo Mineiro <br />
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[http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf Soil Organisms in Organic and Conventional Cropping Systems] <br />
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&nbsp;&nbsp; <br> <br />
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Chengyun Li, Xiahong He, Shusheng Zhu, Huiping Zhou, Yunyue Wang, Yan Li, Jing Yang, Jinxiang Fan, Jincheng Yang, Guibin Wang, Yunfu Long, Jiayou Xu, Yongsheng Tang, Gaohui Zhao, Jiangrong Yang, Lin Liu, Yan Sun, Yong Xie, Haining Wang and Youyong Zhu <br />
<br />
[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 Crop Diversity for Yield Increase] <br />
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Ricardo Antonio Marenco and Ávila Maria Bastos Santos <br />
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[http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf Crop Rotation Reduces Weed Competition and Increases Chlorophyll Concentration and Rice Yield] <br />
<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp;<br>Samuel Kilonzo Mutiga, Linnet S. Gohole and Elmada O. Auma <br />
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[http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432/7872 Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios &nbsp;] <br />
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Gregory A. Jones and Jennifer L. Gillett&nbsp; <br />
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[http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1653/0015-4040%282005%29088%5B0091%3AIWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2 Intercropping with Sunflowers to Attract Beneficial Insects in Organic Agriculture] <br />
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Cristina A. Faria, Felix L. Wäckers, Jeremy Pritchard, David A. Barrett, Ted C. J. Turlings <br />
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[http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600 High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests] <br />
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Andréia S. Guimaraes and José S. Mourao<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml><br />
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[http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/pdf/1746-4269-2-42.pdf Management of Plant Species for Controlling Pests by Peasant Farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba State, Brazil: An Ethnoecological Approach] <br />
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<br> <br />
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Julia Quartz <br />
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[http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh] <br />
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&nbsp; <br>Jack Kloppenburg <br />
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[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full Impending Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty] <br />
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<br>Keith Aoki <br />
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[http://law2.fordham.edu/publications/articles/500flspub17892.pdf "Free Seeds, not Free Beer": Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture] <br />
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'''&nbsp; &nbsp;''' <br />
<br />
Derek Byerlee and Harvey Jesse Dubin <br />
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[http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113 Crop Improvement in the CGIAR as a Global Success Story of Open Access and International Collaboration] <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
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Laxmi Prasad Pant and Helen Hambly-Odame <br />
<br />
Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships <br />
<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp;(This article is freely available online; permission to link it here is in process) <br><br> [http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Agriculture/Attributions Attributions]</div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=2753
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-09-26T12:24:46Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>= '''Introduction:&nbsp;The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
<br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> =<br />
<br />
= =<br />
<br />
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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 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. <br />
<br />
<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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 thst is situated outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
<br />
<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. However, in the end imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive, but worst of all, Esteva says, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
<br />
<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
<br />
<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
<br />
<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
<br />
<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ***<br> <br> <br />
<br />
The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
<br />
<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g.González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers.' (2009: 255) <br />
<br />
<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practice is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities in rain-forest areas 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). In the same vein, their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
My selection of articles for this Living Book seeks to show that agricultural science is already being transformed. However, beyond simply illustrating something that goes on 'out there' anyway, I wish to argue on the one hand that an examination of contemporary agricultural research holds the promise of a renewed dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, and on the other hand that such a dialogue is necessary for a transformation of the politics of knowledge production within technoscientific capitalism. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have already performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for non-human life forms and for non-expert knowledge knowledge practices are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', Remote Sensing, 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', The Plant Cell, 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
<br />
http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
<br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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&nbsp; <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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&nbsp; <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=2752
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-09-26T11:39:39Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>= '''Introduction:&nbsp;The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> =<br />
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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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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 thst is situated outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. However, in the end imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive, but worst of all, Esteva says, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 simply irrelevant] for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g.González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers.' (2009: 255) <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practice is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities in rain-forest areas 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). In the same vein, their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
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<br> My selection of scientific articles for this Living Book seek to illustrate how different techniques and knowledges, some of them scientific, some of them 'local', can contribute in their own partial ways to a dialogical process of designing alternative solutions to agricultural problems. The articles I have chosen can be ordered in a number of different ways but for the sake of the argument, I propose to group them loosely under headings that reflect my own partial argument. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for seeds, for non-expert knowledge, and for small-scale agriculture, for locally-embedded and ecological techniques, are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', Remote Sensing, 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', The Plant Cell, 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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Gnanavel &amp; Gopinath (2010) 'Intelligent Robot Using Wireless Communication for Modern Agriculture', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 34-39. Initially found as record at the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), now only accessible as an abstract at http://www.libsearch.com/view/1025577.<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' The Militant, 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=2751
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-09-26T11:31:37Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>= '''Introduction:&nbsp;The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> =<br />
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= =<br />
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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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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 thst is situated outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. However, in the end imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive, but worst of all, Esteva says, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as simply irrelevant for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g.González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers.' (2009: 255) <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practice is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities in rain-forest areas 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). In the same vein, their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
<br />
<br> My selection of scientific articles for this Living Book seek to illustrate how different techniques and knowledges, some of them scientific, some of them 'local', can contribute in their own partial ways to a dialogical process of designing alternative solutions to agricultural problems. The articles I have chosen can be ordered in a number of different ways but for the sake of the argument, I propose to group them loosely under headings that reflect my own partial argument. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for seeds, for non-expert knowledge, and for small-scale agriculture, for locally-embedded and ecological techniques, are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', Remote Sensing, 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', The Plant Cell, 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Foltz, L. et al (2010) 'Agricultural Pilot's Audiological Profile', ''International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology'', 14 (3): 322-330. <br />
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http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/acervo_eng.asp?id=706<br> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' The Militant, 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Li, et al (2009) 'Review of research on agricultural vehicle autonomous guidance', ''International Journal of Agricultural &amp; Biological Engineering'', 2 (3): 1-16. http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
<br />
http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=2750
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-09-26T11:25:09Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>= '''Introduction:&nbsp;The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> =<br />
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= =<br />
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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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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 thst is situated outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. However, in the end imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive, but worst of all, Esteva says, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.ijabe.org/index.php/ijabe/article/viewFile/160/82 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for improving their productivity by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a [http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as simply irrelevant for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g.González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers.' (2009: 255) <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practice is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities in rain-forest areas 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). In the same vein, their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
<br />
<br> My selection of scientific articles for this Living Book seek to illustrate how different techniques and knowledges, some of them scientific, some of them 'local', can contribute in their own partial ways to a dialogical process of designing alternative solutions to agricultural problems. The articles I have chosen can be ordered in a number of different ways but for the sake of the argument, I propose to group them loosely under headings that reflect my own partial argument. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for seeds, for non-expert knowledge, and for small-scale agriculture, for locally-embedded and ecological techniques, are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
<br />
Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', Remote Sensing, 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', The Plant Cell, 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
<br />
<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' The Militant, 67 (9): March 24. <br> <br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
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http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=2749
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-09-26T11:22:10Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>= '''Introduction:&nbsp;The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
<br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> =<br />
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= =<br />
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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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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 thst is situated outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. However, in the end imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive, but worst of all, Esteva says, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530729 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530731 improving their productivity] by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a[http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as simply irrelevant for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g.González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers.' (2009: 255) <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practice is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities in rain-forest areas 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). In the same vein, their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
<br />
<br> My selection of scientific articles for this Living Book seek to illustrate how different techniques and knowledges, some of them scientific, some of them 'local', can contribute in their own partial ways to a dialogical process of designing alternative solutions to agricultural problems. The articles I have chosen can be ordered in a number of different ways but for the sake of the argument, I propose to group them loosely under headings that reflect my own partial argument. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for seeds, for non-expert knowledge, and for small-scale agriculture, for locally-embedded and ecological techniques, are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', Remote Sensing, 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', The Plant Cell, 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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<br> <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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&nbsp; <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' The Militant, 67 (9): March 24. <br><br />
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Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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Mondall, P. et al (2011) 'Critical Review of Precision Agriculture Technologies and Its Scope of Adoption in India', American Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 1 (3): 49-68. Link: http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&amp;id=2&amp;aid=50<br><br><br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
<br />
http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=2748
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-09-26T11:19:34Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>= '''Introduction:&nbsp;The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> =<br />
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= =<br />
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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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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 thst is situated outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. However, in the end imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive, but worst of all, Esteva says, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530729 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530731 improving their productivity] by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a[http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as simply irrelevant for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g.González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers.' (2009: 255) <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practice is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities in rain-forest areas 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). In the same vein, their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
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<br> My selection of scientific articles for this Living Book seek to illustrate how different techniques and knowledges, some of them scientific, some of them 'local', can contribute in their own partial ways to a dialogical process of designing alternative solutions to agricultural problems. The articles I have chosen can be ordered in a number of different ways but for the sake of the argument, I propose to group them loosely under headings that reflect my own partial argument. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for seeds, for non-expert knowledge, and for small-scale agriculture, for locally-embedded and ecological techniques, are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', Remote Sensing, 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', The Plant Cell, 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
<br />
<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<br />
<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
<br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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<br> <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' The Militant, 67 (9): March 24. Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Osikabor et al (2011) 'Animal-Agriculture Based Entrepreneurship: Descriptive Norms, Perceived Economic Viability and Behavioral Intention Among Final Year Agriculture Related Students in Ibadan, Nigeria', ''Asian Journal of Agricultural Sciences'', 3(2): 87-93. <br />
<br />
http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2011.<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=2747
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-09-26T11:16:08Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>= '''Introduction:&nbsp;The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
<br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> =<br />
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= =<br />
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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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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 thst is situated outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
<br />
<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. However, in the end imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive, but worst of all, Esteva says, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530729 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530731 improving their productivity] by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a[http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as simply irrelevant for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g.González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers.' (2009: 255) <br />
<br />
<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practice is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities in rain-forest areas 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). In the same vein, their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
<br />
<br> My selection of scientific articles for this Living Book seek to illustrate how different techniques and knowledges, some of them scientific, some of them 'local', can contribute in their own partial ways to a dialogical process of designing alternative solutions to agricultural problems. The articles I have chosen can be ordered in a number of different ways but for the sake of the argument, I propose to group them loosely under headings that reflect my own partial argument. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for seeds, for non-expert knowledge, and for small-scale agriculture, for locally-embedded and ecological techniques, are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', Remote Sensing, 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', The Plant Cell, 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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<br> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009. <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Koppel, M. (2003) 'Difference between peasants, farmers? (Reply to a Reader column)' The Militant, 67 (9): March 24. Link to themilitant.com: http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html<br><br />
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<br><br />
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New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=2746
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-09-26T11:12:30Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>= '''Introduction:&nbsp;The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> =<br />
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= =<br />
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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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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 thst is situated outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. However, in the end imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive, but worst of all, Esteva says, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
<br />
<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
<br />
<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
<br />
<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
<br />
<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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<br />
The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530729 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530731 improving their productivity] by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a[http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as simply irrelevant for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
<br />
<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g.González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers.' (2009: 255) <br />
<br />
<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practice is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities in rain-forest areas 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). In the same vein, their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
<br />
<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
<br />
<br> My selection of scientific articles for this Living Book seek to illustrate how different techniques and knowledges, some of them scientific, some of them 'local', can contribute in their own partial ways to a dialogical process of designing alternative solutions to agricultural problems. The articles I have chosen can be ordered in a number of different ways but for the sake of the argument, I propose to group them loosely under headings that reflect my own partial argument. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for seeds, for non-expert knowledge, and for small-scale agriculture, for locally-embedded and ecological techniques, are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', Remote Sensing, 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', The Plant Cell, 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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<br> <br />
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Hickman, L. (2009) 'Against the grain on Norman Bourlaug' guardian.co.uk Tuesday 15 September 2009.<br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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&nbsp; <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=2745
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-09-26T11:08:07Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>= '''Introduction:&nbsp;The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
<br />
= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> =<br />
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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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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 thst is situated outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. However, in the end imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive, but worst of all, Esteva says, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530729 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530731 improving their productivity] by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a[http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as simply irrelevant for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g.González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers.' (2009: 255) <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practice is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities in rain-forest areas 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). In the same vein, their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
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<br> My selection of scientific articles for this Living Book seek to illustrate how different techniques and knowledges, some of them scientific, some of them 'local', can contribute in their own partial ways to a dialogical process of designing alternative solutions to agricultural problems. The articles I have chosen can be ordered in a number of different ways but for the sake of the argument, I propose to group them loosely under headings that reflect my own partial argument. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for seeds, for non-expert knowledge, and for small-scale agriculture, for locally-embedded and ecological techniques, are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References''' <br> <br />
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Akinneni, H. &amp; Junapudi, V. (2010) 'Agriculture Wrapped with Social Networks, Data Mining and Mobile Computing to Boost Up Crop Productivity', ''International Journal of Biological Sciences and Engineering'', 1(1): 43-48.<br> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Becker-Reshef, I. et al (2010) 'Monitoring Global Croplands with Coarse Resolution Earth Observations: The Global Agriculture Monitoring (GLAM) Project', Remote Sensing, 2 (6): 1589-1609. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf<br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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Crouch, M. (1990) 'Debating the Responsibilities of Plant Scientists in the Decade of the Environment', The Plant Cell, 2: 275-277.<br>http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f<br><br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
<br />
&nbsp; <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
New York State College of Agriculture (1898-1904) ''Cornell Reading Course for Farmers. Reading Lesson. 1898-1904.'' Core Historical Literature of Agriculture (CHLA) at Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University.<br>Link: http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html<br><br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Introduction&diff=2744
Agriculture/Introduction
2011-09-26T10:57:27Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>= '''Introduction:&nbsp;The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives''' =<br />
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= Gabriela Méndez Cota<br> =<br />
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= =<br />
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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. [http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html 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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities]. While farmers were being reconceptualized as 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. <br />
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More than 20 years ago [http://www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php 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 only make things worse, 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 [http://cleanseedcapital.com/press/?p=924 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. <br />
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<br> 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 [http://www.plantcell.org/content/2/4/275.full.pdf+html?sid=89ba4101-14bc-4aba-ac2e-8c7a2b48f27f life scientists]&nbsp;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 [http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/ 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 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/norman-borlaug-legacy?INTCMP=SRCH American crop scientist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize], and 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 thst is situated outside the market economy, such as the local networks of reciprocity which have always sustained rural livelihoods, has been constructed within the discursive regime of 'development' as posing a (feminized) threat of engulfment and irrationality. <br />
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<br> In a related account of the Green Revolution, Mexican post-development theorist and activist [http://gustavoesteva.org/09/ Gustavo Esteva] has characterized the failure of the Green Revolution to bring long-term productivity and social well-being as much more than a technical failure. In Mexico, revolutionary agricultural policies which came to support the Green Revolution had the goal of transforming [http://www.themilitant.com/2003/6709/670936.html 'peasants'] into capitalist farmers for the sake of 'national development'. However, in the end imported machines could not harvest crops due to local soil conditions and dependence on fertilizers and irrigation turned out to be both expensive and environmentally destructive, but worst of all, Esteva says, was that campesinos were turned into passive observers of a process in which their only participation amounted to carrying bags of fertilizers to the land (1996: 257, 264). This was not simply a technical mistake, Esteva insists; this was 'knowledge imperialism', the failure 'to host the otherness of the other'. At a time when modernizing narratives of 'development' were refashioning pre-war colonialist discourse, the use of physicalist and probabilistic discourse, a purely instrumental conception of nature and work, the implementation of statistical calculations disconnected from local conditions, and the reliance on models without recognizing any historical specificity were all ways of enacting a biopolitical agenda in the service of global capitalism. <br />
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<br> After 30 years of 'deconstructive' interventions into the hegemonic forms of science, it seems clear today that the epistemic credentials of Western science 'are no longer completely secure' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 260). A 'reconstructive' task is now required, Kloppenburg argues, in order to show that another agriculture is possible as well as desirable. Disagreements remain over whether science should self-reform yet retain its status as a unique and superior form of knowledge, or whether it should radically transform itself and work on a true dialogue with 'local knowledges'. For Kloppenburg it seems clear that an alternative agricultural paradigm requires dialogue, and that dialogue requires that science recognizes its own limits, its own contingent trajectory in a continuous social struggle 'not only to define science in a particular way, but also to exclude other ways of producing knowledge from that definition' (251). More so because, after 30 years of epistemological and ethical critique of Western science, the contest has only started over the meaning of an alternative agriculture, which still is above all a contest regarding who will have 'the power to speak authoritatively in that debate, who is to have a voice at all' (250). This brings us once back to the theme of biopolitics in the context of neoliberalism. <br />
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<br> The continuing dominance of a biopolitical approach to social organization, including agriculture, is made evident today by the relation between contemporary life sciences – or rather, technosciences – and neoliberal capitalism. In a period of economic growth based on the extraction of fossil fuels, agriscience was more attuned to geochemical sciences than to life sciences. Life sciences came to take over the scene of agricultural research only after the oil crises of the 1970s, hand-in-hand with neoliberalism and its new discursive regime. Melinda Cooper (2008) has argued that neoliberalism involves a distinctive form of biopolitics. She has differentiated between welfare or state biopolitics, based on a contract between the state and the laboring body, and neoliberal biopolitics, a project that displaces the welfare contract by eroding its 'constitutive mediations' (9). Such mediations were the gendered boundaries between (paid) production and (unpaid) reproduction, and they ensured that labor and life were not entirely conflated. In other words, the exclusion of female labor from the realm of production in welfare biopolitics was also the model for constructs such as 'human rights' and 'development', two projects closely aligned with but not entirely reducible to the capitalist profit-making imperative. Under neoliberalism, by contrast, the incorporation of reproduction into the sphere of production ultimately eliminates the ontological ground of non-economic values in the discursive organization of the social, including 'life itself' (Franklin, 2000). As Eugene Thacker has pointed out, biotechnology produces 'a body that never stops laboring[, which] is also a biology defined by production' (2005: 38-39). <br />
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<br> Biotechnology relocates production 'at the genetic microbial and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation' (Cooper, 2008: 19). Cooper's suggestive diagnosis in this regard is that we are living through an era of capitalist delirium which is characterized by an attempt to overcome, through a speculative reinvention of the future, the ecological limits of economic growth. She pays special attention to the resonance between neo-vitalist scientific paradigms and the financialization of the global economy. The understanding of life as intrinsically expansive, non-deterministic, and autopoietic seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the global imposition of the debit form of money as 'a process of continuous autopoiesis, a self-engendering of life from life, without conceivable beginning or end' (35-38). The problem with this more-than-rhetorical shift is the same old problem that was already highlighted by Marx, namely, that the production of life under capitalism is premised on the devaluation, or even destruction, of life itself. <br />
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<br> The biopolitics of neoliberal technoscience has become an urgent matter of concern across all disciplines. Donna Haraway (1997) famously insisted that while it signals a dangerous penetration of capitalism into the core of 'life itself', technoscience simultaneously provokes a re-politicization of everything that was previously de-politicized through its association with 'nature'. One of the ways in which technoscience re-politicizes nature is by disrupting 'the separation between the technical and the political', 'the separation of expert knowledge from mere opinion as the legitimizing knowledge for ways of life' (Haraway, 1997: 23). Thus, the life sciences have become a crucial site for the mobilization of marginalized knowledges and practices of life which promote care for life in a complex ecological sense – as opposed to the capitalist exploitation of 'life itself'. In sympathy with Haraway's strong call to engage critically, rather than apocalyptically, with technoscience, I would like to suggest here that an ongoing struggle for self-critique in agricultural science is an indication that biopolitics, like capitalism itself, is not a monolithic 'system', nor is it a sort of deterministic 'program'. The life sciences are a hegemonic terrain, and epistemological critiques of reductionism, novel interdisciplinary and even anti-disciplinary collaborations, as well as experiments informed by holistic approaches to life, should all be considered as crucial aspects of them, as happening within the life sciences rather than as somehow occurring 'outside' of them. If we assume that it is possible to live through biopolitics in more or less critical ways, we might do well to consider local agricultural knowledges and livelihoods, particularly as they evolve in tension with mainstream agricultural science, as sources of guidance for what a different, more caring 'management of life' could be, one positioned against professional or disciplinary boundaries. <br />
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The process of editing this Living Book has been quite a strange experience for me. Most of the material I found in my exploration of open access agricultural science is something I disagree with rather strongly. The dominant arguments seem to confirm that mainstream agricultural science has changed little after thirty years of consistent critique from both academic and activist quarters. Such a finding has left me with the rather unexciting task of having to repeat denunciations that have been made for decades. As much as I wish to do something different than just repeat, it so happens that the modern scientific voice of decontextualized rationality is still around, not just in the form of casual opinions that a few random people hold, but as deeply seated and deeply consequential assumptions within agricultural research. One more or less implicit assumption in much of the research I encountered when browsing through scientific databases is that agricultural laborers are scarce, irrelevant or even an obstacle for agriculture. <br />
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<br> Where farmers are found to be scarce, researchers propose [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530729 tools, such as robots, in order to substitute them]. Where farmers cannot be easily dispensed with, research is concerned with accurately [http://maxwellsci.com/print/ajas/v3-87-93.pdf describing their attitude and behavior] so as to persuade them more effectively to engage in commercial activity, or with developing tools for [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=530731 improving their productivity] by [http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=555911 improving their knowledge]. In such research one seems to hear echoes of post-war developmentalist narratives, yet one can also observe the displacement of developmentalist biopolitics by an increasing interest in information technologies, including [http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/6/1589/pdf global surveillance projects], with a view to developing a[http://www.sciencedomain.org/abstract.php?iid=42&id=2&aid=50 remotely controlled agriculture] of 'precision'. In some cases, the drive to achieve full technological automation is so strong that farmers are implicitly framed as simply irrelevant for cutting-edge agricultural research. More interesting (though not strictly agricultural) pieces of research include a description of the [http://www.arquivosdeorl.org.br/conteudo/pdfForl/14-03-09-eng.pdf agricultural pilot's audiological profile], which suggested to me that the deafening noise of industrial machines such as tractors and planes might have rendered us deaf to what farmers have to say. <br />
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<br> The findings I have just summarized indicate that it remains a challenge for agricultural science to acknowledge the value and complexity of farmer-generated knowledge. While about 60% of the world's cultivated land is still farmed by traditional or subsistence methods, mainstream agriscientists continue to regard such methods as 'primitive', and to assume that the economic and technological integration of local farming systems into the global trade system is the rational step towards increased production and social well being (Altieri, 2001). [http://agroeco.org/ Agroecologists], by contrast, argue that traditional cropping schemes may contain important ecological clues for the development of an alternative agricultural paradigm. [http://www.agroecology.org/CaseStudies_NCAmerica.html Their research] has foregrounded the complexity, efficiency and overall productivity of traditional cropping systems and methods such as agroforestry, minimum tillage, cover cropping and living mulches. Anthropologists and other ethnoscientists have also found that farmers are keen observers of their natural surroundings and that they skillfully mobilize large bodies of empirical knowledge in their agricultural operations. Moreover, it has become apparent that they are generally eager to innovate and to try out experimental techniques which merit being described as forms of research (see e.g.González, 2001). The serious engagement with such forms of research has contributed since the 1980s to the construction of a 'farmers first approach' in which '[t]he route to solutions to problems at the whole-farm level—at the local system level—runs not through agricultural scientists, but through those who think in terms of whole farms, those whose experiences are of whole farms, and whose knowledge has been developed by the integration of hand, brain, and heart in caring labor on whole farms--that is, through farmers.' (2009: 255) <br />
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<br> Today it is no secret that contemporary mainstream agroscience is inextricable from agribusiness, and that it has little to do with 'the knowledge contained in the heads of farmers and agricultural workers' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 248-249). At the same time, the environmental call for 'sustainability' has cleared a space for the growth of alternative agroscientific paradigms such as agroecology. An important lesson that the latter has drawn from traditional farming practice is the importance of an explicit refusal to position the short-term maximization of yield as an overriding goal of agriculture. Attuned to the priorities of rural livelihoods, agroecology has learned to focus on the long-term sustainability of production through ecological interactions guided by local, historically specific systems of knowledge generated by farmers themselves. Nevertheless, in the current neoliberal climate it is also important to remember that any call for 'sustainability' is vulnerable to (mis)appropriation 'as agribusiness mobilizes its resources in an attempt to dominate discourse and to make its meaning of "alternative agriculture" the universal meaning' (Kloppenburg, 2009: 256). Numerous critics have pointed out that 'sustainability' talk tends to presuppose a view of nature according to the urban-industrial system, the active principle of which is a modern conception of the human agent with selfish interests and purposes. We must remain vigilant of how this humanist conception, and particularly its extreme, neoliberal avatar, slips through activist calls to achieve 'sustainaibility'. We must remain critical of the fact that even within the agroecological paradigm, 'biodiversity' is often construed as a reservoir of value, since this is one of the arguments which have most effectively pushed for the recognition of indigenous and peasant communities in rain-forest areas 'as owners of their territories', '[if] only to the extent that they accept to treat it – and themselves – as reservoirs of capital' (Escobar, 1995: 203). In the same vein, their knowledge is positioned as a 'resource' for us to combat the environmental damages which threaten hegemonic forms of life. The 'tropical farmer' emerges within agroecological discourse as a neoliberal construct, as the subject who knows and who will save us from the consequences of our own actions. It is because s/he has managed to survive under conditions of low-quality soils, low capital and low institutional support, in other words, because s/he knows how to be self-reliant in conditions of austerity, that the tropical farmer deserves attention today. From this perspective, the idea that a 'farmers first' approach truly reverses the conventional, humanist and developmentalist narratives is nothing short of naive. As we know from deconstructive theory and practice, crudely oppositional narratives will reproduce rather than transform dominant narratives, and the same goes for the agroecological demand that 'the poor but efficient teach the opulent but wasteful' (Altieri, 2001). <br />
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<br> We are witnessing an unprecedented enclosure of agricultural reproduction, either by means of patents on transgenic life forms or by means of sterilization technologies which prevent farmers from re-using seed. Some researchers emphasize that such a process has been facilitated by the failure of public educational institutions to provide an alternative to a commercial logic in knowledge production (Kloppenburg, 2010: 154). At the same time, the growing limits on academic freedom are motivating new alliances between scientific communities and social movements. These alliances need to mobilize more than the humanist construct of 'farmers' rights', for the latter have so far been subjected to trade and patenting laws, perhaps partly for the same reason as indigenous communities and 'tropical farmers' can easily be framed as neoliberal subjects. The lesson to be learned from this, Kloppenburg argues, is that the struggle for agricultural livelihoods, for the life of seeds and plants, as well as for local and scientific knowledge, must find another, more radical and effective way to counteract the enclosure of life. He calls for us to break, in practice, with the principle of exclusion that governs property relations. For another agriculture to be possible, knowledge producers, science scholars as well as farmers, must create the conditions to enact the principle of sharing as opposed to the principle of exclusion. He calls for the creation of a 'protected commons' of crop genetic resources through an open source biology modelled on the free software movement. Like programmers, he says, farmers have found their traditions of creativity and free exchange being challenged by the hegemonic 'permission culture' and have begun looking for ways not just to protect themselves from enclosure but also to reassert [http://www.isb.vt.edu/news/2005/artspdf/dec0501.pdf their own norms of reciprocity and innovation]. <br />
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<br> My selection of scientific articles for this Living Book seek to illustrate how different techniques and knowledges, some of them scientific, some of them 'local', can contribute in their own partial ways to a dialogical process of designing alternative solutions to agricultural problems. The articles I have chosen can be ordered in a number of different ways but for the sake of the argument, I propose to group them loosely under headings that reflect my own partial argument. Philosophy, or the humanities in a broad sense, have performed an important critical task from within the sciences themselves, a crucial aspect of which has been the exposure of humanism as a metaphysics of patriarchal capitalism. When I refer to 'the posthuman life of agriculture' or to 'agriculture and posthuman values', I mean the self-critique of science which takes the form of a critique of humanism on an epistemological, ontological and ethico-political level. In the context of contemporary biopolitics, posthumanism can be interpreted as an intensified sort of modernist ideology, as an obsession with microscopic entities, as humanism gone mad with technoenthusiasm. Yet posthumanism should also be interpreted as a radical critique of humanism, a decentering of the abstract human subject as the controller of the universe orientated towards an ethical alternative to capitalist hegemony. Struggles for seeds, for non-expert knowledge, and for small-scale agriculture, for locally-embedded and ecological techniques, are a breeding ground for progressive sorts of posthumanist interventions. These interventions require that we pay close attention to the work of politically committed scientists, and that we participate in the dialogue they are seeking to create with local knowledges. In other words, if another technoscience is possible, the humanities must continue to articulate their self-critique with the self-critique of Western science and to to be willing to 'interbreed' with local knowledges as part of the struggle for an alternative agriculture. <br />
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'''References ''' <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span> <br />
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Altieri, M. A. (2001) 'Fatal harvest: old and new dimensions of the ecological tragedy of modern agriculture',&nbsp;''Journal of Business Administration and Policy Analysis&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">30-31:&nbsp;[http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf http://agroecology.pbworks.com/f/Altieri-NEMETZ.pdf], last access 17/08/2011.</span><br> <br />
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Cooper, M. (2008)&nbsp;''Life as Surplus. Biotechnology &amp; Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Seattle &amp; London: University of Washington Press.</span> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Escobar, A. (1995)&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of&nbsp;</span>the Third World.''&nbsp;Princeton: Princeton University Press.<br> <br />
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<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Esteva, G. (1994) 'Re-embedding Food in Agriculture',&nbsp;</span>''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Culture and</span>&nbsp;Agriculture'''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span>'''''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">48:</span>&nbsp;2-12. <br />
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Esteva, G. (1996) 'Hosting the Otherness of the Other: The Case of the Green Revolution', in Marglin, F. &amp; Marglin, S. (eds),&nbsp;''Decolonizing knowledge: from development to dialogue.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;Oxford: Clarendon.</span> <br />
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Franklin, S. (2000) 'Life Itself: Global Nature and the Genetic Imaginary', in Franklin, S.&nbsp;''et al''&nbsp;''Global Nature, Global Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Sage.</span> <br />
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González, R. J. (2001)&nbsp;''Zapotec Science; Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca.&nbsp;''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">Austin: University of Texas Press.</span> <br />
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Haraway, D. (1997)&nbsp;''Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan''''_'''''<i>Meets_OncoMouse&nbsp;'Feminism and Technoscience.<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;</span></i><span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">London:</span>Routledge. <br />
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Hillison, J. (1996) 'The Origins of Agriscience: Or Where Did All That Scientific Agriculture Come From', ''Journal of Agricultural Education'', 37(4): 8-13. <br />
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Link: http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html Permission to link granted by journal editor T. Grady Roberts.<br> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2009) 'Social theory and the de/reconstruction of agricultural science: local knowledge for an alternative agriculture', in Henderson, G. &amp; Waterstone, M. (eds),&nbsp;''Geographic Thought. A Praxis Perspective.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London: Routledge.</span> <br />
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Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Seed Sovereignty. The Promise of Open Source Biology', in Wittman, H.&nbsp;''et al&nbsp;''(eds),&nbsp;''Food Sovereignty. Reconnecting Food, Nature, and Community''. Oakland, CA: Food First Books.<br> <br />
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Thacker, E. 2005.&nbsp;''The Global Genome. Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture.''<span style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-style: normal;">&nbsp;London &amp; Cambridge: MIT Press.</span></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Attributions&diff=2742
Agriculture/Attributions
2011-09-26T10:35:26Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities'' ==<br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Power, A. (2010) 'Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies', ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', 365 (1554): 2959-2971. <br />
<br />
Link: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full <br />
<br />
Licence: Article deposited by The Royal Society in PubMedCentral to be accessed freely via EXis Open Choice under a Creative Commons licence allowing redistribution and re-use.<br>&nbsp;<br> <br />
<br />
Navarrete, A.; Cannavan, F.; Taketani, R.; Tsai, S. (2010) 'A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems', ''Diversity'' 2 (5): 787-809.<br> Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf <br> Licence: ''Diversity'' is an open access journal published by MDPI. All articles published by MDPI are made available under an open access license worldwide immediately. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in MDPI journals, and everyone is free to re-use the published material given proper accreditation/citation of the original publication. Open access publication is supported by authors' institutes or research funding agency by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Bettiol, W. et al (2002) 'Soil organisms in organic and conventional cropping systems', ''Scientia Agricola'', 59 (3): 565-572. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf <br />
<br />
Licence: The reproduction of articles published in ''Scientia Agricola'' is allowed only with citation of the source. Use of published material for commercial purposes is prohibited.&nbsp;All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which permits to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as to remix or adapt the work. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Thieu, V.; Billen, G.; Garnier, J. &amp; Benoît, M. (2010) 'Nitrogen cycling in a hypothetical scenario of generalised organic agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt watersheds', ''Regional Environmental Change'', 11 (2): 359-370. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html <br />
<br />
Licence: © The Author(s) 2010 via a link to SpringerOpen, the new suite of fully and immediately open access journals which publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Li et al. (2009) 'Crop Diversity for Yield Increase', PLoS ONE 4(11): e8049. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 <br />
<br />
Licence: © 2009 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Mutiga, S.; Gohole, L. &amp; Auma, E. (2011) 'Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios', ''Journal of Agricultural Science'', 3 (1):22-27. <br>Link: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432<br>Licence: © Canadian Center of Science and Education. The Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE) publishes a number of journals all of which are peer reviewed, and open access for download. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License - Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) which allows to to copy, distribute and transmit, adapt and to make commercial use of the work.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Marenco, R. &amp; Bastos, M. (1999) 'Crop rotation reduces weed competition and increases chlorophyll concentration and yield of rice', ''Pesquisa Agropecuaria Brasileira'', 34 (10): 1881-1887. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf<br>Licence: All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which allows to share and remix the work only for non-commercial purposes.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Faria et al (2007) 'High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests', PLoS ONE 2(7): e600. Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600<br>Licence: © 2007 Faria et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.<br> <br />
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<br> <br />
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Guimarães, A. &amp; Mourão, J. (2006) 'Management of plant species for controlling pests, by peasant farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba state, Brazil: an ethnoecological approach', ''Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine'', 2:42.<br>Link: http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/2/1/42<br>Licence: © 2006 Guimarães and Mourão; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.<br>This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Quartz, J. (2010) 'Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh', ''International Journal of Technology and Development Studies'', 1&nbsp;(1): 55-92. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf<br>Licence: The International Journal of Technology and Development Studies is a peer-reviewed and open access journal published two times a year. Creative Commons License © 2005-2011 CTC, Social Sciences Group, Wageningen University. Some rights reserved.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Jones, G. &amp; Gillett, J. (2005) 'Intercropping with sunflowers to attract beneficial insects in organic agriculture', ''Florida Entomologist'', 88(1):91-96. 2005. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1653/0015-4040(2005)088%5B0091:IWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2<br>Licence: The official journal of the Florida Entomological Society, Florida Entomologist is also the first journal to put its contents on the Internet in PDF format, the first life science journal to have all current and back issues on the Web with free access, the first entomological journal to allow authors to archive supplemental digital material with their articles, the first journal to be freely accessible on BioOne, a nonprofit, online aggregation of core research in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences. Usage of BioOne content is strictly limited to personal, educational, and non-commercial use. There is no copyright indication either on the article or on the Florida Entomologist website. Request for more information is being processed.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty', ''Journal of Agrarian Change'', Vol. 10 No. 3, July 2010, pp. 367–388.<br> Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full<br> Licence: © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Access to this article from the Journal of Agrarian Change is provided free of charge via a link to Wiley Online Library. Information about permissions was obtained from Cris Kay, editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change, and Lydia Webb, Senior Publishing Assistant at Wiley-Blackwell.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Aoki, K. (2009) 'Free Seeds, Not Free Beer: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture', ''Fordham Law Review'' 77 (5) <br>Link:&nbsp;http://law2.fordham.edu/publications/articles/500flspub17892.pdf<br>Licence: This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Fordham Law School Institutional Repository. There is no copyright indication but request for more information is being processed.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Byerlee, D., &amp; Dubin, H. (2009) 'Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration',<br>''International Journal Of The Commons'', 4(1). <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113<br>Licence: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. <br> <br />
<br />
<br>Prasad, L. &amp; Hambly-Odame, H. (2010) 'Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships', ''The Public Sector Innovation Journal'', 15 (2):<br>Link: http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/pant_odame_creative_commons4final2rev.pdf<br>Licence: © 1995-2011, Eleanor Glor, Editor-in-Chief. WAITING For a Response from the Editor-in-Chief.<br><br></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Attributions&diff=2730
Agriculture/Attributions
2011-09-26T09:52:26Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities'' ==<br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Power, A. (2010) 'Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies', ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', 365 (1554): 2959-2971. <br />
<br />
Link: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full <br />
<br />
Licence: Article deposited by The Royal Society in PubMedCentral to be accessed freely via EXis Open Choice under a Creative Commons licence allowing redistribution and re-use.<br>&nbsp;<br> <br />
<br />
Navarrete, A.; Cannavan, F.; Taketani, R.; Tsai, S. (2010) 'A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems', ''Diversity'' 2 (5): 787-809.<br> Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf <br> Licence: ''Diversity'' is an open access journal published by MDPI. All articles published by MDPI are made available under an open access license worldwide immediately. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in MDPI journals, and everyone is free to re-use the published material given proper accreditation/citation of the original publication. Open access publication is supported by authors' institutes or research funding agency by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Bettiol, W. et al (2002) 'Soil organisms in organic and conventional cropping systems', ''Scientia Agricola'', 59 (3): 565-572. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf <br />
<br />
Licence: The reproduction of articles published in ''Scientia Agricola'' is allowed only with citation of the source. Use of published material for commercial purposes is prohibited.&nbsp;All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which permits to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as to remix or adapt the work. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Thieu, V.; Billen, G.; Garnier, J. &amp; Benoît, M. (2010) 'Nitrogen cycling in a hypothetical scenario of generalised organic agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt watersheds', ''Regional Environmental Change'', 11 (2): 359-370. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html <br />
<br />
Licence: © The Author(s) 2010 via a link to SpringerOpen, the new suite of fully and immediately open access journals which publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Li et al. (2009) 'Crop Diversity for Yield Increase', PLoS ONE 4(11): e8049. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 <br />
<br />
Licence: © 2009 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Mutiga, S.; Gohole, L. &amp; Auma, E. (2011) 'Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios', ''Journal of Agricultural Science'', 3 (1):22-27. <br>Link: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432<br>Licence: © Canadian Center of Science and Education. The Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE) publishes a number of journals all of which are peer reviewed, and open access for download. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License - Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) which allows to to copy, distribute and transmit, adapt and to make commercial use of the work.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Marenco, R. &amp; Bastos, M. (1999) 'Crop rotation reduces weed competition and increases chlorophyll concentration and yield of rice', ''Pesquisa Agropecuaria Brasileira'', 34 (10): 1881-1887. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf<br>Licence: All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which allows to share and remix the work only for non-commercial purposes.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Faria et al (2007) 'High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests', PLoS ONE 2(7): e600. Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600<br>Licence: © 2007 Faria et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Guimarães, A. &amp; Mourão, J. (2006) 'Management of plant species for controlling pests, by peasant farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba state, Brazil: an ethnoecological approach', ''Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine'', 2:42.<br>Link: http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/2/1/42<br>Licence: © 2006 Guimarães and Mourão; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.<br>This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Quartz, J. (2010) 'Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh', ''International Journal of Technology and Development Studies'', 1&nbsp;(1): 55-92. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf<br>Licence: The International Journal of Technology and Development Studies is a peer-reviewed and open access journal published two times a year. Creative Commons License © 2005-2011 CTC, Social Sciences Group, Wageningen University. Some rights reserved.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Jones, G. &amp; Gillett, J. (2005) 'Intercropping with sunflowers to attract beneficial insects in organic agriculture', ''Florida Entomologist'', 88(1):91-96. 2005. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1653/0015-4040(2005)088%5B0091:IWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2<br>Licence: The official journal of the Florida Entomological Society, Florida Entomologist is also the first journal to put its contents on the Internet in PDF format, the first life science journal to have all current and back issues on the Web with free access, the first entomological journal to allow authors to archive supplemental digital material with their articles, the first journal to be freely accessible on BioOne, a nonprofit, online aggregation of core research in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences. Usage of BioOne content is strictly limited to personal, educational, and non-commercial use. There is no copyright indication either on the article or on the Florida Entomologist website. Request for more information is being processed.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty', ''Journal of Agrarian Change'', Vol. 10 No. 3, July 2010, pp. 367–388.<br> Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full<br> Licence: © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Access to this article from the Journal of Agrarian Change is provided free of charge via a link to Wiley Online Library. Information about permissions was obtained from Cris Kay, editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change, and Lydia Webb, Senior Publishing Assistant at Wiley-Blackwell.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Aoki, K. (2009) 'Free Seeds, Not Free Beer: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture', ''Fordham Law Review'' 77 (5) <br>Link: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4440&amp;context=flr<br>Licence: This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Fordham Law School Institutional Repository.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Byerlee, D., &amp; Dubin, H. (2009) 'Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration',<br>''International Journal Of The Commons'', 4(1). <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113<br>Licence: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. <br> <br />
<br />
<br>Prasad, L. &amp; Hambly-Odame, H. (2010) 'Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships', ''The Public Sector Innovation Journal'', 15 (2):<br>Link: http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/pant_odame_creative_commons4final2rev.pdf<br>Licence: © 1995-2011, Eleanor Glor, Editor-in-Chief. WAITING For a Response from the Editor-in-Chief.<br><br></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Attributions&diff=2729
Agriculture/Attributions
2011-09-26T09:37:22Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities'' ==<br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Power, A. (2010) 'Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies', ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', 365 (1554): 2959-2971. <br />
<br />
Link: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full <br />
<br />
Licence: Article deposited by The Royal Society in PubMedCentral to be accessed freely via EXis Open Choice under a Creative Commons licence allowing redistribution and re-use.<br>&nbsp;<br> <br />
<br />
Navarrete, A.; Cannavan, F.; Taketani, R.; Tsai, S. (2010) 'A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems', ''Diversity'' 2 (5): 787-809.<br> Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf <br> Licence: ''Diversity'' is an open access journal published by MDPI. All articles published by MDPI are made available under an open access license worldwide immediately. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in MDPI journals, and everyone is free to re-use the published material given proper accreditation/citation of the original publication. Open access publication is supported by authors' institutes or research funding agency by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Bettiol, W. et al (2002) 'Soil organisms in organic and conventional cropping systems', ''Scientia Agricola'', 59 (3): 565-572. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf <br />
<br />
Licence: The reproduction of articles published in ''Scientia Agricola'' is allowed only with citation of the source. Use of published material for commercial purposes is prohibited.&nbsp;All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which permits to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as to remix or adapt the work. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Thieu, V.; Billen, G.; Garnier, J. &amp; Benoît, M. (2010) 'Nitrogen cycling in a hypothetical scenario of generalised organic agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt watersheds', ''Regional Environmental Change'', 11 (2): 359-370. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html <br />
<br />
Licence: © The Author(s) 2010 via a link to SpringerOpen, the new suite of fully and immediately open access journals which publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Li et al. (2009) 'Crop Diversity for Yield Increase', PLoS ONE 4(11): e8049. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 <br />
<br />
Licence: © 2009 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Mutiga, S.; Gohole, L. &amp; Auma, E. (2011) 'Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios', ''Journal of Agricultural Science'', 3 (1):22-27. <br>Link: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432<br>Licence: © Canadian Center of Science and Education. The Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE) publishes a number of journals all of which are peer reviewed, and open access for download. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License - Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) which allows to to copy, distribute and transmit, adapt and to make commercial use of the work.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Marenco, R. &amp; Bastos, M. (1999) 'Crop rotation reduces weed competition and increases chlorophyll concentration and yield of rice', ''Pesquisa Agropecuaria Brasileira'', 34 (10): 1881-1887. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf<br>Licence: All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which allows to share and remix the work only for non-commercial purposes.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Faria et al (2007) 'High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests', PLoS ONE 2(7): e600. Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600<br>Licence: © 2007 Faria et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Guimarães, A. &amp; Mourão, J. (2006) 'Management of plant species for controlling pests, by peasant farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba state, Brazil: an ethnoecological approach', ''Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine'', 2:42.<br>Link: http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/2/1/42<br>Licence: © 2006 Guimarães and Mourão; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.<br>This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Quartz, J. (2010) 'Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh', ''International Journal of Technology and Development Studies'', 1&nbsp;(1): 55-92. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf<br>Licence: The International Journal of Technology and Development Studies is a peer-reviewed and open access journal published two times a year. Creative Commons License © 2005-2011 CTC, Social Sciences Group, Wageningen University. Some rights reserved.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Jones, G. &amp; Gillett, J. (2005) 'Intercropping with sunflowers to attract beneficial insects in organic agriculture', ''Florida Entomologist'', 88(1):91-96. 2005. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1653/0015-4040(2005)088%5B0091:IWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2<br>Licence: Access free via a link to BioOne (www.bioone.org), a nonprofit, online aggregation of core research in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences. Usage of BioOne content is strictly limited to personal, educational, and non-commercial use. Commercial inquiries or rights and permissions requests should be directed to the individual publisher as copyright holder. <br><br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty', ''Journal of Agrarian Change'', Vol. 10 No. 3, July 2010, pp. 367–388.<br> Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full<br> Licence: © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Access to this article from the Journal of Agrarian Change is provided free of charge via a link to Wiley Online Library. Information about permissions was obtained from Cris Kay, editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change, and Lydia Webb, Senior Publishing Assistant at Wiley-Blackwell.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Aoki, K. (2009) 'Free Seeds, Not Free Beer: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture', ''Fordham Law Review'' 77 (5) <br>Link: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4440&amp;context=flr<br>Licence: This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Fordham Law School Institutional Repository.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Byerlee, D., &amp; Dubin, H. (2009) 'Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration',<br>''International Journal Of The Commons'', 4(1). <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113<br>Licence: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. <br> <br />
<br />
<br>Prasad, L. &amp; Hambly-Odame, H. (2010) 'Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships', ''The Public Sector Innovation Journal'', 15 (2):<br>Link: http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/pant_odame_creative_commons4final2rev.pdf<br>Licence: © 1995-2011, Eleanor Glor, Editor-in-Chief. WAITING For a Response from the Editor-in-Chief.<br><br></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Attributions&diff=2728
Agriculture/Attributions
2011-09-26T09:04:04Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities'' ==<br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Power, A. (2010) 'Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies', ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', 365 (1554): 2959-2971. <br />
<br />
Link: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full <br />
<br />
Licence: Article deposited by The Royal Society in PubMedCentral to be accessed freely via EXis Open Choice under a Creative Commons licence allowing redistribution and re-use.<br>&nbsp;<br> <br />
<br />
Navarrete, A.; Cannavan, F.; Taketani, R.; Tsai, S. (2010) 'A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems', ''Diversity'' 2 (5): 787-809.<br> Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf <br> Licence: ''Diversity'' is an open access journal published by MDPI. All articles published by MDPI are made available under an open access license worldwide immediately. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in MDPI journals, and everyone is free to re-use the published material given proper accreditation/citation of the original publication. Open access publication is supported by authors' institutes or research funding agency by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Bettiol, W. et al (2002) 'Soil organisms in organic and conventional cropping systems', ''Scientia Agricola'', 59 (3): 565-572. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf <br />
<br />
Licence: The reproduction of articles published in ''Scientia Agricola'' is allowed only with citation of the source. Use of published material for commercial purposes is prohibited.&nbsp;All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which permits to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as to remix or adapt the work. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Thieu, V.; Billen, G.; Garnier, J. &amp; Benoît, M. (2010) 'Nitrogen cycling in a hypothetical scenario of generalised organic agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt watersheds', ''Regional Environmental Change'', 11 (2): 359-370. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html <br />
<br />
Licence: © The Author(s) 2010 via a link to SpringerOpen, the new suite of fully and immediately open access journals which publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Li et al. (2009) 'Crop Diversity for Yield Increase', PLoS ONE 4(11): e8049. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 <br />
<br />
Licence: © 2009 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Mutiga, S.; Gohole, L. &amp; Auma, E. (2011) 'Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios', ''Journal of Agricultural Science'', 3 (1):22-27. <br>Link: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432<br>Licence: © Canadian Center of Science and Education. The Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE) publishes a number of journals all of which are peer reviewed, and open access for download. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License - Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) which allows to to copy, distribute and transmit, adapt and to make commercial use of the work.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Marenco, R. &amp; Bastos, M. (1999) 'Crop rotation reduces weed competition and increases chlorophyll concentration and yield of rice', ''Pesquisa Agropecuaria Brasileira'', 34 (10): 1881-1887. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf<br>Licence: All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which allows to share and remix the work only for non-commercial purposes.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Faria et al (2007) 'High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests', PLoS ONE 2(7): e600. Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600<br>Licence: © 2007 Faria et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Guimarães, A. &amp; Mourão, J. (2006) 'Management of plant species for controlling pests, by peasant farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba state, Brazil: an ethnoecological approach', ''Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine'', 2:42.<br>Link: http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/2/1/42<br>Licence: © 2006 Guimarães and Mourão; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.<br>This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Quartz, J. (2010) 'Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh', ''International Journal of Technology and Development Studies'', 1&nbsp;(1): 55-92. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf<br>Licence: The International Journal of Technology and Development Studies is a peer-reviewed and open access journal published two times a year. Creative Commons License © 2005-2011 CTC, Social Sciences Group, Wageningen University. Some rights reserved.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Jones, G. &amp; Gillett, J. (2005) 'Intercropping with sunflowers to attract beneficial insects in organic agriculture', ''Florida Entomologist'', 88(1):91-96. 2005. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1653/0015-4040(2005)088%5B0091:IWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2<br>Licence: “BioOne does not endorse, review, or authorize the content stated on this site.”<br>Free, but permission to link is required (In process)<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty', ''Journal of Agrarian Change'', Vol. 10 No. 3, July 2010, pp. 367–388.<br> Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full<br> Licence: © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Access to this article from the Journal of Agrarian Change is provided free of charge via a link to Wiley Online Library. Information about permissions was obtained from Cris Kay, editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change, and Lydia Webb, Senior Publishing Assistant at Wiley-Blackwell.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Aoki, K. (2009) 'Free Seeds, Not Free Beer: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture', ''Fordham Law Review'' 77 (5) <br>Link: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4440&amp;context=flr<br>Licence: This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Fordham Law School Institutional Repository.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Byerlee, D., &amp; Dubin, H. (2009) 'Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration',<br>''International Journal Of The Commons'', 4(1). <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113<br>Licence: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. <br> <br />
<br />
<br>Prasad, L. &amp; Hambly-Odame, H. (2010) 'Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships', ''The Public Sector Innovation Journal'', 15 (2):<br>Link: http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/pant_odame_creative_commons4final2rev.pdf<br>Licence: © 1995-2011, Eleanor Glor, Editor-in-Chief. WAITING For a Response from the Editor-in-Chief.<br><br></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Another_Technoscience_is_Possible&diff=2727
Another Technoscience is Possible
2011-09-26T08:59:24Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
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<br />
= '''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities''' =<br />
<br />
= edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota =<br />
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<br> <br />
<br />
== [http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Agriculture/Introduction '''Introduction: The Posthuman Life of Agriculture: Local Knowledges, Open Source Lives'''] ==<br />
<br />
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.&nbsp;[http://www.jae-online.org/back-issues/58-volume-37-number-4-1996/556-the-origins-of-agriscience-or-where-did-all-that-scientific-agriculture-come-from.html The scientification of agriculture]&nbsp;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 [http://chla.library.cornell.edu/c/chla/browse/title/7032038.html the production of new, modern subjectivities].&nbsp;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. [http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Agriculture/Introduction (more...)] <br />
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<br> <br />
<br />
== <br> ==<br />
<br />
== ==<br />
<br />
Alison G. Power <br />
<br />
[http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full Ecosystem Services and Agriculture: Tradeoffs and Synergies] <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Acácio A. Navarrete, Fabiana S. Cannavan, Rodrigo G. Taketani and Tsiu M. Tsai <br />
<br />
[http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems] <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Wagner Bettiol, Raquel Ghini, José Abrahao Haddad Galvao, Marcos Antônio Vieira Ligo and Jeferson Luiz de Carvhalo Mineiro <br />
<br />
[http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf Soil Organisms in Organic and Conventional Cropping Systems] <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Vincent Thieu, Gilles Billen, Josette Garnier and Marc Benoît <br />
<br />
[http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html Nitrogen Cycling in a Hypothetical Scenario of Generalised Organic Agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt Watersheds] <br />
<br />
&nbsp;&nbsp; <br> <br />
<br />
Chengyun Li, Xiahong He, Shusheng Zhu, Huiping Zhou, Yunyue Wang, Yan Li, Jing Yang, Jinxiang Fan, Jincheng Yang, Guibin Wang, Yunfu Long, Jiayou Xu, Yongsheng Tang, Gaohui Zhao, Jiangrong Yang, Lin Liu, Yan Sun, Yong Xie, Haining Wang and Youyong Zhu <br />
<br />
[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 Crop Diversity for Yield Increase] <br />
<br />
<br>Samuel Kilonzo Mutiga, Linnet S. Gohole and Elmada O. Auma <br />
<br />
[http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432/7872 Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios &nbsp;] <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Ricardo Antonio Marenco and Ávila Maria Bastos Santos <br />
<br />
[http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf Crop Rotation Reduces Weed Competition and Increases Chlorophyll Concentration and Rice Yield] <br />
<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp; <br />
<br />
Cristina A. Faria, Felix L. Wäckers, Jeremy Pritchard, David A. Barrett, Ted C. J. Turlings <br />
<br />
[http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600 High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests] <br />
<br />
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Andréia S. Guimaraes and José S. Mourao<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml><br />
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[http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/pdf/1746-4269-2-42.pdf Management of Plant Species for Controlling Pests by Peasant Farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba State, Brazil: An Ethnoecological Approach] <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Julia Quartz <br />
<br />
[http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh] <br />
<br />
&nbsp; <br>Gregory A. Jones and Jennifer L. Gillett&nbsp; <br />
<br />
[http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1653/0015-4040%282005%29088%5B0091%3AIWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2 Intercropping with Sunflowers to Attract Beneficial Insects in Organic Agriculture] <br />
<br />
<br>Jack Kloppenburg <br />
<br />
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full Impending Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty] <br />
<br />
<br>Keith Aoki <br />
<br />
[http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4440&context=flr "Free Seeds, not Free Beer": Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture] <br />
<br />
'''&nbsp; &nbsp;''' <br />
<br />
Derek Byerlee and Harvey Jesse Dubin <br />
<br />
[http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113 Crop Improvement in the CGIAR as a Global Success Story of Open Access and International Collaboration] <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Laxmi Prasad Pant and Helen Hambly-Odame <br />
<br />
Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships <br />
<br />
&nbsp; &nbsp;(This article is freely available online; permission to link it here is in process) <br><br> [http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Agriculture/Attributions Attributions]</div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Attributions&diff=2725
Agriculture/Attributions
2011-09-26T08:57:34Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities'' ==<br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Power, A. (2010) 'Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies', ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', 365 (1554): 2959-2971. <br />
<br />
Link: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full <br />
<br />
Licence: Article deposited by The Royal Society in PubMedCentral to be accessed freely via EXis Open Choice under a Creative Commons licence allowing redistribution and re-use.<br>&nbsp;<br> <br />
<br />
Navarrete, A.; Cannavan, F.; Taketani, R.; Tsai, S. (2010) 'A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems', ''Diversity'' 2 (5): 787-809.<br> Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf <br> Licence: ''Diversity'' is an open access journal published by MDPI. All articles published by MDPI are made available under an open access license worldwide immediately. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in MDPI journals, and everyone is free to re-use the published material given proper accreditation/citation of the original publication. Open access publication is supported by authors' institutes or research funding agency by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Bettiol, W. et al (2002) 'Soil organisms in organic and conventional cropping systems', ''Scientia Agricola'', 59 (3): 565-572. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf <br />
<br />
Licence: The reproduction of articles published in ''Scientia Agricola'' is allowed only with citation of the source. Use of published material for commercial purposes is prohibited.&nbsp;All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which permits to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as to remix or adapt the work. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Thieu, V.; Billen, G.; Garnier, J. &amp; Benoît, M. (2010) 'Nitrogen cycling in a hypothetical scenario of generalised organic agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt watersheds', ''Regional Environmental Change'', 11 (2): 359-370. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html <br />
<br />
Licence: © The Author(s) 2010 via a link to SpringerOpen, the new suite of fully and immediately open access journals which publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Li et al. (2009) 'Crop Diversity for Yield Increase', PLoS ONE 4(11): e8049. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 <br />
<br />
Licence: © 2009 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Mutiga, S.; Gohole, L. &amp; Auma, E. (2011) 'Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios', ''Journal of Agricultural Science'', 3 (1):22-27. <br>Link: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432<br>Licence: © Canadian Center of Science and Education. The Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE) publishes a number of journals all of which are peer reviewed, and open access for download. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License - Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) which allows to to copy, distribute and transmit, adapt and to make commercial use of the work.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Marenco, R. &amp; Bastos, M. (1999) 'Crop rotation reduces weed competition and increases chlorophyll concentration and yield of rice', ''Pesquisa Agropecuaria Brasileira'', 34 (10): 1881-1887. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf<br>Licence: All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which allows to share and remix the work only for non-commercial purposes.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Faria et al (2007) 'High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests', PLoS ONE 2(7): e600. Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600<br>Licence: © 2007 Faria et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Guimarães, A. &amp; Mourão, J. (2006) 'Management of plant species for controlling pests, by peasant farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba state, Brazil: an ethnoecological approach', ''Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine'', 2:42.<br>Link: http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/2/1/42<br>Licence: © 2006 Guimarães and Mourão; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.<br>This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Quartz, J. (2010) 'Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh', ''International Journal of Technology and Development Studies'', 1&nbsp;(1): 55-92. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf<br>Licence: The International Journal of Technology and Development Studies is a peer-reviewed and open access journal published two times a year. Creative Commons License © 2005-2011 CTC, Social Sciences Group, Wageningen University. Some rights reserved.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Jones, G. &amp; Gillett, J. (2005) 'Intercropping with sunflowers to attract beneficial insects in organic agriculture', ''Florida Entomologist'', 88(1):91-96. 2005. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1653/0015-4040(2005)088%5B0091:IWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2<br>Licence: “BioOne does not endorse, review, or authorize the content stated on this site.”<br>Free, but permission to link is required (In process)<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty', ''Journal of Agrarian Change'', Vol. 10 No. 3, July 2010, pp. 367–388.<br> Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full<br> Licence: © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Access to this article from the Journal of Agrarian Change is provided free of charge via a link to Wiley Online Library. Information about permissions was obtained from Cris Kay, editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change, and Lydia Webb, Senior Publishing Assistant at Wiley-Blackwell.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Aoki, K. (2009) 'Free Seeds, Not Free Beer: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture', ''Fordham Law Review'' 77 (5) <br>Link: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4440&amp;context=flr<br>Licence: This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Fordham Law School Institutional Repository.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Byerlee, D., &amp; Dubin, H. (2009) 'Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration',<br>''International Journal Of The Commons'', 4(1). <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113<br>Licence: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. <br> <br />
<br />
<br>Prasad, L. &amp; Hambly-Odame, H. (2010) 'Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships', ''The Public Sector Innovation Journal'', 15 (2):<br>http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/pant_odame_creative_commons4final2rev.pdf<br>WAITING For a Response from the Editor-in-Chief<br><br></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Attributions&diff=2718
Agriculture/Attributions
2011-09-26T08:52:07Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities'' ==<br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Power, A. (2010) 'Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies', ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', 365 (1554): 2959-2971. <br />
<br />
Link: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full <br />
<br />
Licence: Article deposited by The Royal Society in PubMedCentral to be accessed freely via EXis Open Choice under a Creative Commons licence allowing redistribution and re-use.<br>&nbsp;<br> <br />
<br />
Navarrete, A.; Cannavan, F.; Taketani, R.; Tsai, S. (2010) 'A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems', ''Diversity'' 2 (5): 787-809.<br> Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf <br> Licence: ''Diversity'' is an open access journal published by MDPI. All articles published by MDPI are made available under an open access license worldwide immediately. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in MDPI journals, and everyone is free to re-use the published material given proper accreditation/citation of the original publication. Open access publication is supported by authors' institutes or research funding agency by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Bettiol, W. et al (2002) 'Soil organisms in organic and conventional cropping systems', ''Scientia Agricola'', 59 (3): 565-572. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf <br />
<br />
Licence: The reproduction of articles published in ''Scientia Agricola'' is allowed only with citation of the source. Use of published material for commercial purposes is prohibited.&nbsp;All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which permits to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as to remix or adapt the work. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Thieu, V.; Billen, G.; Garnier, J. &amp; Benoît, M. (2010) 'Nitrogen cycling in a hypothetical scenario of generalised organic agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt watersheds', ''Regional Environmental Change'', 11 (2): 359-370. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html <br />
<br />
Licence: © The Author(s) 2010 via a link to SpringerOpen, the new suite of fully and immediately open access journals which publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Li et al. (2009) 'Crop Diversity for Yield Increase', PLoS ONE 4(11): e8049. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 <br />
<br />
Licence: © 2009 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Mutiga, S.; Gohole, L. &amp; Auma, E. (2011) 'Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios', ''Journal of Agricultural Science'', 3 (1):22-27. <br>Link: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432<br>Licence: © Canadian Center of Science and Education. The Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE) publishes a number of journals all of which are peer reviewed, and open access for download. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License - Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) which allows to to copy, distribute and transmit, adapt and to make commercial use of the work.<br> <br />
<br />
<br><br />
<br />
Marenco, R. &amp; Bastos, M. (1999) 'Crop rotation reduces weed competition and increases chlorophyll concentration and yield of rice', ''Pesquisa Agropecuaria Brasileira'', 34 (10): 1881-1887. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf<br>Licence: All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which allows to share and remix the work only for non-commercial purposes.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Faria et al (2007) 'High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests', PLoS ONE 2(7): e600. Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600<br>Licence: © 2007 Faria et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Guimarães, A. &amp; Mourão, J. (2006) 'Management of plant species for controlling pests, by peasant farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba state, Brazil: an ethnoecological approach', ''Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine'', 2:42.<br>Link: http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/2/1/42<br>Licence: © 2006 Guimarães and Mourão; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.<br>This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Quartz, J. (2010) 'Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh', ''International Journal of Technology and Development Studies'', 1&nbsp;(1): 55-92. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf<br>Licence: © Some rights reserved / Creative Commons license / Open Access Journal<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Jones, G. &amp; Gillett, J. (2005) 'Intercropping with sunflowers to attract beneficial insects in organic agriculture', ''Florida Entomologist'', 88(1):91-96. 2005. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1653/0015-4040(2005)088%5B0091:IWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2<br>Licence: “BioOne does not endorse, review, or authorize the content stated on this site.”<br>Free, but permission to link is required (In process)<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty', ''Journal of Agrarian Change'', Vol. 10 No. 3, July 2010, pp. 367–388.<br> Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full<br> Licence: © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Access to this article from the Journal of Agrarian Change is provided free of charge via a link to Wiley Online Library. Information about permissions was obtained from Cris Kay, editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change, and Lydia Webb, Senior Publishing Assistant at Wiley-Blackwell.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Aoki, K. (2009) 'Free Seeds, Not Free Beer: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture', ''Fordham Law Review'' 77 (5) <br>Link: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4440&amp;context=flr<br>Licence: This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Fordham Law School Institutional Repository.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Byerlee, D., &amp; Dubin, H. (2009) 'Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration',<br>''International Journal Of The Commons'', 4(1). <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113<br>Licence: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. <br> <br />
<br />
<br>Prasad, L. &amp; Hambly-Odame, H. (2010) 'Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships', ''The Public Sector Innovation Journal'', 15 (2):<br>http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/pant_odame_creative_commons4final2rev.pdf<br>WAITING For a Response from the Editor-in-Chief<br><br></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Attributions&diff=2716
Agriculture/Attributions
2011-09-26T08:48:32Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities'' ==<br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Power, A. (2010) 'Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies', ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', 365 (1554): 2959-2971. <br />
<br />
Link: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full <br />
<br />
Licence: Article deposited by The Royal Society in PubMedCentral to be accessed freely via EXis Open Choice under a Creative Commons licence allowing redistribution and re-use.<br>&nbsp;<br> <br />
<br />
Navarrete, A.; Cannavan, F.; Taketani, R.; Tsai, S. (2010) 'A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems', ''Diversity'' 2 (5): 787-809.<br> Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf <br> Licence: ''Diversity'' is an open access journal published by MDPI. All articles published by MDPI are made available under an open access license worldwide immediately. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in MDPI journals, and everyone is free to re-use the published material given proper accreditation/citation of the original publication. Open access publication is supported by authors' institutes or research funding agency by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Bettiol, W. et al (2002) 'Soil organisms in organic and conventional cropping systems', ''Scientia Agricola'', 59 (3): 565-572. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf <br />
<br />
Licence: The reproduction of articles published in ''Scientia Agricola'' is allowed only with citation of the source. Use of published material for commercial purposes is prohibited.&nbsp;All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which permits to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as to remix or adapt the work. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Thieu, V.; Billen, G.; Garnier, J. &amp; Benoît, M. (2010) 'Nitrogen cycling in a hypothetical scenario of generalised organic agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt watersheds', ''Regional Environmental Change'', 11 (2): 359-370. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html <br />
<br />
Licence: © The Author(s) 2010 via a link to SpringerOpen, the new suite of fully and immediately open access journals which publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Li et al. (2009) 'Crop Diversity for Yield Increase', PLoS ONE 4(11): e8049. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 <br />
<br />
Licence: © 2009 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Mutiga, S.; Gohole, L. &amp; Auma, E. (2011) 'Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios', ''Journal of Agricultural Science'', 3 (1):22-27. <br>Link: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432<br>Licence: © Canadian Center of Science and Education. The Canadian Center of Science and Education (CCSE) publishes a number of journals all of which are peer reviewed, and open access for download. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License - Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) which allows to to copy, distribute and transmit, adapt and to make commercial use of the work.<br><br />
<br />
Marenco, R. &amp; Bastos, M. (1999) 'Crop rotation reduces weed competition and increases chlorophyll concentration and yield of rice', ''Pesquisa Agropecuaria Brasileira'', 34 (10): 1881-1887. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf<br>Licence: All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Faria et al (2007) 'High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests', PLoS ONE 2(7): e600. Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600<br>Licence: © 2007 Faria et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Guimarães, A. &amp; Mourão, J. (2006) 'Management of plant species for controlling pests, by peasant farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba state, Brazil: an ethnoecological approach', ''Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine'', 2:42.<br>Link: http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/2/1/42<br>Licence: © 2006 Guimarães and Mourão; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.<br>This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Quartz, J. (2010) 'Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh', ''International Journal of Technology and Development Studies'', 1&nbsp;(1): 55-92. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf<br>Licence: © Some rights reserved / Creative Commons license / Open Access Journal<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Jones, G. &amp; Gillett, J. (2005) 'Intercropping with sunflowers to attract beneficial insects in organic agriculture', ''Florida Entomologist'', 88(1):91-96. 2005. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1653/0015-4040(2005)088%5B0091:IWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2<br>Licence: “BioOne does not endorse, review, or authorize the content stated on this site.”<br>Free, but permission to link is required (In process)<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty', ''Journal of Agrarian Change'', Vol. 10 No. 3, July 2010, pp. 367–388.<br> Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full<br> Licence: © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Access to this article from the Journal of Agrarian Change is provided free of charge via a link to Wiley Online Library. Information about permissions was obtained from Cris Kay, editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change, and Lydia Webb, Senior Publishing Assistant at Wiley-Blackwell.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Aoki, K. (2009) 'Free Seeds, Not Free Beer: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture', ''Fordham Law Review'' 77 (5) <br>Link: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4440&amp;context=flr<br>Licence: This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Fordham Law School Institutional Repository.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Byerlee, D., &amp; Dubin, H. (2009) 'Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration',<br>''International Journal Of The Commons'', 4(1). <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113<br>Licence: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. <br> <br />
<br />
<br>Prasad, L. &amp; Hambly-Odame, H. (2010) 'Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships', ''The Public Sector Innovation Journal'', 15 (2):<br>http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/pant_odame_creative_commons4final2rev.pdf<br>WAITING For a Response from the Editor-in-Chief<br><br></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Attributions&diff=2714
Agriculture/Attributions
2011-09-26T08:43:42Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities'' ==<br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Power, A. (2010) 'Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies', ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', 365 (1554): 2959-2971. <br />
<br />
Link: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full <br />
<br />
Licence: Article deposited by The Royal Society in PubMedCentral to be accessed freely via EXis Open Choice under a Creative Commons licence allowing redistribution and re-use.<br>&nbsp;<br> <br />
<br />
Navarrete, A.; Cannavan, F.; Taketani, R.; Tsai, S. (2010) 'A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems', ''Diversity'' 2 (5): 787-809.<br> Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf <br> Licence: ''Diversity'' is an open access journal published by MDPI. All articles published by MDPI are made available under an open access license worldwide immediately. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in MDPI journals, and everyone is free to re-use the published material given proper accreditation/citation of the original publication. Open access publication is supported by authors' institutes or research funding agency by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles.&nbsp; <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Bettiol, W. et al (2002) 'Soil organisms in organic and conventional cropping systems', ''Scientia Agricola'', 59 (3): 565-572. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf <br />
<br />
Licence: The reproduction of articles published in ''Scientia Agricola'' is allowed only with citation of the source. Use of published material for commercial purposes is prohibited.&nbsp;All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which permits to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as to remix or adapt the work. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Thieu, V.; Billen, G.; Garnier, J. &amp; Benoît, M. (2010) 'Nitrogen cycling in a hypothetical scenario of generalised organic agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt watersheds', ''Regional Environmental Change'', 11 (2): 359-370. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html <br />
<br />
Licence: © The Author(s) 2010 via a link to SpringerOpen, the new suite of fully and immediately open access journals which publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Li et al. (2009) 'Crop Diversity for Yield Increase', PLoS ONE 4(11): e8049. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 <br />
<br />
Licence: © 2009 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Mutiga, S.; Gohole, L. &amp; Auma, E. (2011) 'Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios', ''Journal of Agricultural Science'', 3 (1):22-27. <br>Link: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432<br>Licence: © Canadian Center of Science and Education This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.<br> <br />
<br />
<br>Marenco, R. &amp; Bastos, M. (1999) 'Crop rotation reduces weed competition and increases chlorophyll concentration and yield of rice', ''Pesquisa Agropecuaria Brasileira'', 34 (10): 1881-1887. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf<br>Licence: All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Faria et al (2007) 'High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests', PLoS ONE 2(7): e600. Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600<br>Licence: © 2007 Faria et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Guimarães, A. &amp; Mourão, J. (2006) 'Management of plant species for controlling pests, by peasant farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba state, Brazil: an ethnoecological approach', ''Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine'', 2:42.<br>Link: http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/2/1/42<br>Licence: © 2006 Guimarães and Mourão; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.<br>This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Quartz, J. (2010) 'Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh', ''International Journal of Technology and Development Studies'', 1&nbsp;(1): 55-92. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf<br>Licence: © Some rights reserved / Creative Commons license / Open Access Journal<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Jones, G. &amp; Gillett, J. (2005) 'Intercropping with sunflowers to attract beneficial insects in organic agriculture', ''Florida Entomologist'', 88(1):91-96. 2005. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1653/0015-4040(2005)088%5B0091:IWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2<br>Licence: “BioOne does not endorse, review, or authorize the content stated on this site.”<br>Free, but permission to link is required (In process)<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty', ''Journal of Agrarian Change'', Vol. 10 No. 3, July 2010, pp. 367–388.<br> Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full<br> Licence: © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Access to this article from the Journal of Agrarian Change is provided free of charge via a link to Wiley Online Library. Information about permissions was obtained from Cris Kay, editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change, and Lydia Webb, Senior Publishing Assistant at Wiley-Blackwell.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Aoki, K. (2009) 'Free Seeds, Not Free Beer: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture', ''Fordham Law Review'' 77 (5) <br>Link: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4440&amp;context=flr<br>Licence: This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Fordham Law School Institutional Repository.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Byerlee, D., &amp; Dubin, H. (2009) 'Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration',<br>''International Journal Of The Commons'', 4(1). <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113<br>Licence: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. <br> <br />
<br />
<br>Prasad, L. &amp; Hambly-Odame, H. (2010) 'Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships', ''The Public Sector Innovation Journal'', 15 (2):<br>http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/pant_odame_creative_commons4final2rev.pdf<br>WAITING For a Response from the Editor-in-Chief<br><br></div>
Investigarte
https://livingbooksaboutlife.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agriculture/Attributions&diff=2712
Agriculture/Attributions
2011-09-26T08:39:14Z
<p>Investigarte: </p>
<hr />
<div>== ''Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities'' ==<br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Power, A. (2010) 'Ecosystem services and agriculture: tradeoffs and synergies', ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', 365 (1554): 2959-2971. <br />
<br />
Link: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554/2959.full <br />
<br />
Licence: Article deposited by the Royal Society in PubMedCentral to be accessed freely via EXis Open Choice under a Creative Commons licence allowing redistribution and re-use.<br>&nbsp;<br><br />
<br />
Navarrete, A.; Cannavan, F.; Taketani, R.; Tsai, S. (2010) 'A Molecular Survey of the Diversity of Microbial Communities in Different Amazonian Agricultural Model Systems', ''Diversity'' 2 (5): 787-809.<br> Link: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/2/5/787/pdf <br> Licence: All articles published by MDPI are made available under an open access license worldwide immediately. This means: everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles published in MDPI journals, and everyone is free to re-use the published material given proper accreditation/citation of the original publication. Open access publication is supported by authors' institutes or research funding agency by payment of a comparatively low Article Processing Charge (APC) for accepted articles. ''Diversity'' is an open access journal published by MDPI. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Bettiol, W. et al (2002) 'Soil organisms in organic and conventional cropping systems', ''Scientia Agricola'', 59 (3): 565-572. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sa/v59n3/10591.pdf <br />
<br />
Licence: The reproduction of articles published in ''Scientia Agricola'' is allowed only with citation of the source. Use of published material for commercial purposes is prohibited.&nbsp;All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) which permits to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as to remix or adapt the work. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Thieu, V.; Billen, G.; Garnier, J. &amp; Benoît, M. (2010) 'Nitrogen cycling in a hypothetical scenario of generalised organic agriculture in the Seine, Somme and Scheldt watersheds', ''Regional Environmental Change'', 11 (2): 359-370. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/w218435644u81584/fulltext.html <br />
<br />
Licence: © The Author(s) 2010 via a link to SpringerOpen, the new suite of fully and immediately open access journals which publish articles under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Li et al. (2009) 'Crop Diversity for Yield Increase', PLoS ONE 4(11): e8049. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008049 <br />
<br />
Licence: © 2009 Li et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Mutiga, S.; Gohole, L. &amp; Auma, E. (2011) 'Agronomic Performance of Collards under Two Intercrops and Varying Nitrogen Application Levels as Assessed Using Land Equivalent Ratios', ''Journal of Agricultural Science'', 3 (1):22-27. <br>Link: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jas/article/view/7432<br>Licence: © Canadian Center of Science and Education This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.<br> <br />
<br />
<br>Marenco, R. &amp; Bastos, M. (1999) 'Crop rotation reduces weed competition and increases chlorophyll concentration and yield of rice', ''Pesquisa Agropecuaria Brasileira'', 34 (10): 1881-1887. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/pab/v34n10/7189.pdf<br>Licence: All the content of the journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License<br><br> <br />
<br />
Faria et al (2007) 'High Susceptibility of Bt Maize to Aphids Enhances the Performance of Parasitoids of Lepidopteran Pests', PLoS ONE 2(7): e600. Link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000600<br>Licence: © 2007 Faria et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Guimarães, A. &amp; Mourão, J. (2006) 'Management of plant species for controlling pests, by peasant farmers at Lagoa Seca, Paraíba state, Brazil: an ethnoecological approach', ''Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine'', 2:42.<br>Link: http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/2/1/42<br>Licence: © 2006 Guimarães and Mourão; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.<br>This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Quartz, J. (2010) 'Creative Dissent with Technoscience in India: The Case of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) in Andra Pradesh', ''International Journal of Technology and Development Studies'', 1&nbsp;(1): 55-92. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.ijtds.com/IJTDS1_1_quartz.pdf<br>Licence: © Some rights reserved / Creative Commons license / Open Access Journal<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Jones, G. &amp; Gillett, J. (2005) 'Intercropping with sunflowers to attract beneficial insects in organic agriculture', ''Florida Entomologist'', 88(1):91-96. 2005. <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.bioone.org/doi/pdf/10.1653/0015-4040(2005)088%5B0091:IWSTAB%5D2.0.CO%3B2<br>Licence: “BioOne does not endorse, review, or authorize the content stated on this site.”<br>Free, but permission to link is required (In process)<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Kloppenburg, J. (2010) 'Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty', ''Journal of Agrarian Change'', Vol. 10 No. 3, July 2010, pp. 367–388.<br> Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2010.00275.x/full<br> Licence: © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Article is freely accessible via a link to Wiley Online Library. Information was obtained from Cris Kay, editor of the Journal of Agrarian Change, and Lydia Webb, Senior Publishing Assistant at Wiley-Blackwell.<br> <br />
<br />
<br> <br />
<br />
Aoki, K. (2009) 'Free Seeds, Not Free Beer: Participatory Plant Breeding, Open Source Seeds, and Acknowledging User Innovation in Agriculture', ''Fordham Law Review'' 77 (5) <br>Link: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4440&amp;context=flr<br>Licence: This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Fordham Law School Institutional Repository.<br><br> <br />
<br />
Byerlee, D., &amp; Dubin, H. (2009) 'Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration',<br>''International Journal Of The Commons'', 4(1). <br />
<br />
Link: http://www.thecommonsjournal.org/index.php/ijc/article/view/147/113<br>Licence: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. <br> <br />
<br />
<br>Prasad, L. &amp; Hambly-Odame, H. (2010) 'Creative Commons: Non-Proprietary Innovation Triangles in International Agricultural and Rural Development Partnerships', ''The Public Sector Innovation Journal'', 15 (2):<br>http://www.innovation.cc/scholarly-style/pant_odame_creative_commons4final2rev.pdf<br>WAITING For a Response from the Editor-in-Chief<br><br></div>
Investigarte