Social Constraints on Crop Biotechnology in Developing Countries

Western scientists and development officials are often discomfited by the fact that farmers in the developing world rarely behave like the independent actors of neoclassical economics. Instead, farmers appear to be enmeshed in a social fabric, and their decisions often seem unduly guided by social factors such as customs, obligations, and beliefs. It is not surprising that many outsiders regard this social fabric primarily as a constraint to progress—constraining diet (white maize instead of yellow in Mexico; white rice instead of brown in India), economic development (subsistence provisioning instead of cash cropping), and ecological strategies (slashing and burning instead of intensifying). However, this social fabric also facilitates agriculture. Part of understanding constraints to biotechnology in developing countries requires recognizing agriculture as a system with social as well as economic and ecological components. The effects and fate of crop biotechnology in the developing world will depend not simply on agronomic performance, but on how new technologies are incorporated into such systems. Particularly important is the social component in indigenous management skill. “Skill” here refers not simply to knowledge of plants and agronomic processes, or proficiency at agricultural tasks, but more generally to the farmer’s ability to execute a performance based on agronomic knowledge, economic strategy, prediction of a range of factors, and manipulation of socially mediated resources (Richards, 1989). Skill is not simply objective information that exists sui generis; it is largely generated, maintained, and implemented socially. It is acquired through observing, discussing, and often participating in each other’s agricultural operations. When seeds move between farmers and communities, information, expressed in locally meaningful concepts, moves along with them (Richards, 1997; Sillitoe, 1998, 2000). The presence of other farms in the community increases the number of “experiments” each farmer can observe; farmers may have detailed knowledge of local practices that allows them to “harvest” information from each other’s farms.1 Management skill involves not only observing empirical results, but also interpreting them, and this has a social component as well. Acts of cultivation under actual conditions are always imperfect experiments in which the farmer may not control rainfall, fluctuating pest populations, availability and quality of chemical and labor inputs, soil fertility, and other factors.2 Therefore, empirical results are often ambiguous and in need of interpretation, which is shaped by discussion among community members, application of local conceptual