Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in Argentina

313 Pages·2016·11.427 MB·English

by  Pablo Lapenga

Introduction
University Press Scholarship Online
Oxford Scholarship Online
Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops,
Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in
Argentina
Pablo Lapegna
Print publication date: 2016
Print ISBN-13: 9780190215132
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190215132.001.0001
Introduction
GM Crops, Global Ethnography, and the Dynamics of
Demobilization
Pablo Lapegna
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190215132.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter introduces the broad questions tackled by the
book: What challenges do subordinate groups face when
seeking to address environmental problems threatening their
health and livelihoods? How do subordinate groups resist, but
also negotiate and accommodate environmental threats and
economic marginalization? The first section situates GM crops
in the global context, focusing the expansion of agribusiness
and the neoliberal globalization of the 1990s. The second
section presents concepts of space and scale to discuss the
global reach and localized manifestations of GM crops and
their socioenvironmental impacts. The third section discusses
the literature on social movements, processes of
demobilization, and patronage politics. The fourth section
explains why a global ethnography approach is best suited to
analyze the social processes addressed by the book and
complement the insights of the literature on food regimes.
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Introduction
Keywords:   genetically modified crops, neoliberal globalization, neoliberal food
regime, global ethnography, space and scale, social movements, demobilization,
patronage politics
In February 2003, Nélida woke up on her small farm early as
usual and went outside to feed her chickens.1 Nélida lives in
Monte Azul, a rural community in the province of Formosa, in
northern Argentina. That morning she noticed that her
manioc, corn, and vegetables were all completely withered.
The day before, farmworkers had been spraying
agrochemicals on a large nearby field of genetically modified
(GM) soybeans. Carried by the wind, the agrochemicals had
spread to the smaller neighboring farms, affecting Nélida and
at least two dozen other peasant families.2 This agrochemical
drift destroyed the cotton that the peasants were about to
harvest and withered the vegetables they sold at a local
farmers market and used to feed their families. The damage
was not isolated to the crops, but also affected the health of
the surrounding community. Locals, and especially children,
developed headaches, muscular pains, nausea, vomiting,
breathing problems, skin rashes, and unusual pimples.
In the ensuing months, peasants reacted to this environmental
damage by organizing some of the most disruptive and visible
protests in the recent history of Formosa. In Monte Azul the
affected families, many of them members of the grassroots
organization MoCaFor (the Peasant Movement of Formosa,
Movimiento Campesino de Formosa), organized several
roadblocks and filed suits against agribusinessmen,
demanding reparation for damages to their farms. The
protests soon spread to other parts of the province. In Moreno,
another stronghold of MoCaFor, peasants and local inhabitants
seized a crop duster (the airplane used to spray (p.2)
agrochemicals) and occupied the local airport for a week. They
did not leave until they were reassured that the fumigations
would cease.
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Introduction
Fast-forward six years, to February 2009, when Nélida awoke
to find an unsettling landscape: most of her chickens were
dead or walking around the yard erratically. Throughout
Monte Azul, nearly 100 chickens were dead and people
(especially children) were again suffering from skin irritations
and respiratory ailments, caused by another agrochemical
drift. In Moreno, while aerial fumigations ceased after the
2003 protests, people continued suffering from agrochemical
exposure and related health problems. Yet in 2009, unlike the
response in 2003, no protests took place in either of these
communities. Two points in time, two comparable problems of
agrochemical exposure, and yet the same people reacted very
differently: with intensive, disruptive protests in 2003, and
with no collective action in 2009. Why, when facing
environmental damage, do people from the same communities
first react by organizing contentious protests and later fail to
engage in collective action?
In this book, I scrutinize these events to tackle two issues:
first, to analyze the social and environmental consequences of
GM herbicide-resistant crops; and second, to understand the
politics of demobilization in contemporary Argentina. Paying
attention to subjective, organizational, and political dynamics,
I analyze how peasants move from contention to
accommodation, reconstructing the impacts of social
movement alliances and evaluating the effects of authorities’
responses (which change from dismissal to recognition). In
short, this book is about the sweeping expansion of GM crops
in Argentina, cases of agrochemical exposure, and processes
of popular mobilization and demobilization as they open
windows to agrarian, environmental, and political debates.
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Introduction
Why should we be concerned about GM crops and the fate of
peasants and small farmers? What can we learn from the
skyrocketing expansion of GM crops in Argentina and from an
analysis of processes of demobilization? First, GM herbicide-
resistant crops perpetuate an agricultural production centered
on monoculture and agrochemical use. As such, they represent
a hazard for populations exposed to agrochemicals and
contribute to the economic concentration of agricultural
production. This book shows that the widespread use of GM
herbicide-resistant crops may create serious problems of
agrochemical exposure and inhibit forms of production carried
out by small farmers and peasants. Argentina, in short,
provides critical lessons on the deleterious consequences of a
massive experiment in transgenic monoculture and its
negative socioenvironmental impacts.
(p.3) The findings presented in this book apply to soybeans
that were genetically modified to resist a specific herbicide
and not necessarily to all transgenic crops (although I also
briefly discuss the adoption of GM herbicide-resistant cotton).
Although there is much discussion around the potential
impacts of GM crops in general, whether positive or negative,
analyzing Argentina and zooming in on specific rural
communities allow us to inspect some of the actual effects of
transgenic agriculture.
Second, by studying processes of demobilization, we can have
a more comprehensive understanding of contentious politics,
integrating concepts that explain the emergence of collective
action with those that explain the waning of contention. I
argue that the study of the ebb and flow of contention in the
context of GM crop expansion offers lessons on how
subordinate actors (in this case, peasants and the rural poor)
think, feel, and act about socioenvironmental changes, and on
how they resist but also negotiate and accommodate negative
socioenvironmental impacts.
GM Crops as Global Project
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Introduction
The 1987 footage shows four men wearing suits and white lab
coats, standing inside a greenhouse filled with plants. The
intermittent clicking and flashes of photographers registering
the event punctuate their conversation. “We have before the
USDA right now a request to test this for the first time at a
farm in Illinois this year,” says one of the men to another who
is listening attentively, arms crossed in front of the coat
embroidered with his name and position: “Vice President
George Bush.” The vice president was touring a Monsanto
Company research facility, and the executives and scientists
were eager to test a genetically engineered soybean designed
to resist the herbicide produced by the company. “And I will
say quite frankly, we have no complaint about the way the
USDA is handling it,” continues the Monsanto executive.
“They’re going through an orderly process; they’re making
sure as they deal with these new things they do it properly …”
After an awkward pause, the executive clarified: “If we’re
[still] waitin’ until September and we don’t have our
authorization, we may say something different!” When
chuckles subside, the Vice President Bush offers a word of
comfort: “Call me. We’re in the ‘de-reg’ business.”3
Those “new things” that the executive referred to were seeds
genetically engineered to resist Monsanto’s herbicide,
Roundup, and while Monsanto was initiating the biotech
business, the government was promoting the de-reg (p.4)
business. By 1993, George Bush had gone on to become
president of the United States and as part of his regulatory
relief initiative the federal government authorized the release
of biotechnology products into the environment. “The United
States is already the world leader in biotechnology. And, we
want to keep it that way. [The biotechnology industry] should
reach at least 50 billion dollars by the year 2000, as long as we
resist the spread of unnecessary regulation,” said Bush’s vice
president, Dan Quayle, when he announced the new policy. In
1994, the first GM food was offered in the US market.4 In
1996, GM herbicide-resistant soybean seeds were sold in the
United States, unleashing the commercialization of other GM
seeds and launching a profound transformation of agriculture
around the world.
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Introduction
Genetically modified seeds were created in the 1990s, but are
also a descendant of the “green revolution” in agriculture.
Between the 1940s and the 1970s, philanthropic organizations
(e.g., the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations) partnered with
public institutions to support research and development
initiatives to create hybrid seeds, crossing different varieties
of plants and producing new varieties of maize, cotton, and
wheat in Mexico, India, China, Pakistan, and the Philippines
(Ross 2003). This process of technological diffusion known as
the agricultural green revolution had at its core a
“technological package” of hybrid seeds, agrochemicals
(fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides), and machinery (to sow,
fumigate, and harvest the crops) designed to increase crop
yields. The hybrid seeds of the green revolution and
genetically engineered varieties, however, result from
contrasting social processes and are different seeds. Hybrids
are obtained from crossing different strands of plants while
genetically engineered varieties result from recombining the
DNA of plants with DNA of viruses and bacteria. Socially,
whereas the green revolution was fueled by public–private
partnerships, the “gene revolution” is overwhelmingly funded
and controlled by corporations (Patel 2012, Pingali and Raney
2005, Kloppenburg 2005).
At least four salient features of transgenics allow us to identify
them as global crops. First, transgenics are transforming
agricultural production in diverse parts of the world. Second,
they are created, patented, and commercialized by global
corporations. Third, they have been adopted on the heels of
the neoliberal globalization that spanned the globe in the
1990s. Finally, transnational social movements and NGOs have
been resisting and opposing GM crops, mirroring their global
diffusion (McMichael 2009, Heller 2013, Newell 2008, Otero
2012, Pechlaner 2012, Schurman and Munro 2010, Scoones
2008).
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Introduction
(p.5) In the United States, GM crops have expanded rapidly
since 1996. In 2011 they represented nearly 90% of soybeans
cultivated in the United States, in addition to more than 80%
of maize, and more than 75% of cotton (Lang 2013). In
contrast, the production of GM crops in Europe is still
restricted as a result of concerns raised by food scandals
(most noticeably, “mad cow” disease), the adamant
mobilization of environmental and farmers’ organizations, and
backlash to the aggressive marketing strategy implemented by
Monsanto when trying to introduce GM seeds on the continent
(Heller 2013, Schurman and Munro 2010). In so-called
developing countries, the approval of GM seeds followed the
track of the green revolution and found elective affinities with
countries adopting neoliberalization policies. Argentina
approved GM soybeans in 1996, China and India approved GM
cotton in 1997 and 2002, and South Africa approved GM corn
in 2001. By 2011, eleven countries accounted for more than
98% of the 170 million hectares planted with GM crops: the
United States, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, India, China,
Paraguay, South Africa, Pakistan, Uruguay, and Bolivia, in
decreasing area (James 2012). Despite this global expansion,
83% of the world area planted with GM crops was
concentrated in just four countries (the United States, Brazil,
Argentina, and Canada).
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Introduction
In South America, the diffusion of GM crops intersected with
processes of neoliberal globalization, which facilitated the
increasing operation and control of agribusiness corporations
over agriculture. In December 2003, Syngenta Company, one
of the six biggest global biotech corporations, published a
curious advertisement in an Argentine national newspaper.
Next to the slogan “Soybeans Have No Frontiers,” the ad
showed a map of South America and a green patch covering
most of Uruguay, northern Argentina, eastern Bolivia,
southern Brazil, and all of Paraguay, with the words “United
Republic of Soybeans” at its center (see Figure I.1). The ad
prompted the reaction of anti-GM activists, since at that time
transgenic soybeans were only legal in Argentina and Uruguay
(Bravo 2010, Manzur et al. 2011). Transgenic seeds were
smuggled from Argentina and illegally planted in Paraguay
and southern Brazil in the late 1990s. Farmer associations and
agribusiness lobbyists used the de facto situation of thousands
of hectares planted with GM crops to pressure states and
national governments, ultimately gaining approval for growing
and commercializing GM crops.5
Ultimately, the United Republic of Soybeans ad proved to be
premonitory: Paraguay officially authorized the production of
GM soybeans in 2004, and Brazil and Bolivia in 2005. By 2011,
GM crops in South America (mostly soybeans but also corn
and cotton) had been sown across more than 66 million (p.6)
hectares, representing close to 40% of the global GM crop
area (a landmass comparable to the states of California and
Oregon combined). Argentina and Brazil are clearly the
biggest GM crops growers in Latin America, with almost 24
and more than 36 million hectares of GM crops sown in 2011,
respectively (James 2012). Argentine and Brazilian
agribusiness have played a key role in the growth of
transgenic production in Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia
(Bravo 2010, Galeano 2012).
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Introduction
During this
period of
global
expansion,
GM seeds
developed
two
intertwined
lives. In one
life they are a
product, a
seed
genetically
engineered to
express a trait
that simplifies
agricultural
production.
Contrary to
popular
belief, GM Figure I.1 United Republic of Soybeans
seeds do not
necessarily
result in higher yields and fall short of solving the problem of
agrochemical use.6 The most widely sold GM seeds (p.7)
(soybeans, maize, canola, and cotton) are engineered to
tolerate herbicides or eliminate insects, thus making
production more standard and simpler to manage. Soybeans
and canola were genetically engineered to resist Roundup (a
glyphosate-based herbicide produced by Monsanto Company)
and corn and cotton to produce a toxin that kills pests. In their
life as seeds, GM crops are sown, grown, and harvested. But
GM crops also have another life, expressed in the imagination,
discourses, ideas, and projects of businessmen, policymakers,
activists, scientists, scholars, and consumers. In this second
life, GM crops elicit polarized views of aggressive promotion
and entrenched opposition. As crops intertwined with projects
and discourses, transgenics have incited both praise and
condemnation throughout the world, receiving similar doses of
enthusiastic adoption, critical appraisal, and adamant
rejection.
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Introduction
The promotion of GM crops grew through a cross pollination
of discursive themes that are highly problematic from a
sociological perspective but are nonetheless deeply rooted
among policymakers and the general public. I argue that
technophile, productivist, Malthusian, and moral narratives
are weaved into a highly influential “techno-productivist”
discursive formation.7 First, a technophile discourse taps into
the ingrained idea of technology as a neutral tool; in the case
of agriculture, a disembedded biotechnology is assumed to
have the same results independently of the social context
(Kinchy 2012, Levidow 1998, McAfee 2003).8 Second, this idea
is reinforced when combined with a productivist frame, that is,
the unexamined assumption that agricultural production has
to progressively increase yields.9 Third, a neo-Malthusian
narrative reinforces these technophile and productivist views,
arguing that there is a pressing need to increase agricultural
production in order to keep up with population growth (Ross
2003). Insufficient access to food is construed as a supply
problem that can be solved by a “technological fix” (Goodman
and Redclift 1991: 142), thus excluding “the complex political,
social and economic dimensions of the question of access to
food in favour of the simplified notion of ‘feeding the world’ as
a global project” (Brooks 2005: 367). The corollary of this
techno-productivist discursive formation is a legitimizing
moral imperative, presenting GM crops as a “pro-poor”
technology that fulfills missions of corporate social
responsibility (Glover 2007, 2010a, 2010b). This techno-
productivist discursive formation is not entirely new but rather
an extension of the ideas supporting the so-called green
revolution (Patel 2012), and these discourses continue to be
mobilized, for instance, to promote GM cotton in Asia and the
introduction of GM corn in (p.8) Africa (Cohen and Paarlberg
2004, Cooper, Lipper, and Zilberman 2005, Paarlberg 2009).
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