Stealth Seeds: Bioproperty, Biosafety, Biopolitics

Transgenic seeds in both India (Bt cotton) and Brazil (glyphosate-resistant soybeans) spread widely and rapidly through farming communities outside the reach of biosafety or bioproperty institutions. Stealth transgenics are saved, cross-bred, repackaged, sold, exchanged and planted in an anarchic agrarian capitalism that defies surveillance and control of firms and states. The outcome is more pro-poor than alternative modes of diffusion, but undermines a growing consensus in the international development community on appropriate biosafety and intellectual property institutions for biotechnology. Second, stealth procurement of biotechnology divides nominally pro-poor political coalitions, driven by a great ideational divide on uncertainties and risks of transgenics. The ability of seeds to move underground through stealth strategies of farmers undermines widely-assumed bio-safety-regime capability. Likewise, property in biotechnology appears less monopolistic and powerful, more relational and contingent. Stealth practices of farmers in pursuit of transgenics contrary to wishes of firms, states and many NGOs suggest a different model of the farmer than that often encountered in both developmentalist and anti-‘GMO’ discourse: more active, creative and autonomous, less hapless and supine. Resultant incapacity of social institutions to secure interests of firms and states in biotechnology renders more likely eventual development of controls from genetic engineering – the ‘terminator technology’ of political dramaturgy. I. Monsanto, Terminators, and the Mud In July 2003, before a meeting in Palakkad district, south India, to memorialise the peasant leader Keraleeyan, agrarian activists told me and each other of threats from ‘the terminator’. I explained to colleagues that the ‘Monsanto/terminator/suicideseed’ narrative about Bt cotton tests was a product of a Canadian web site, NGOs and instrumental political dramaturgy, not reality. Politely, no one corrected me. At the meeting, a prominent public intellectual – P. A. Vasudevan – said that the current stage of historic agrarian struggles for which Kerala is justifiably well-known is only for ‘the mud’; world agriculture will be controlled by Monsanto and Cargill, through biotechnology. Popular forces had learned how to struggle against and defeat the Correspondence Address: Ronald J. Herring, 313 White Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 14853 USA. Email: [email protected] Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, 130–157, January 2007 ISSN 0022-0388 Print/1743-9140 Online/07/010130-28 a 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/00220380601055601 landlords, their goondas and police, but they did not know how to fight globalisation. The emergence of a new farmer organisation in a district already intensively organised reflects his analysis: the Deshiya Karshaka Samrakshana Samithi (National Agriculturalist Protection Committee, DKKS) was formed to protect farmers from globalisation, one prominent manifestation of which was Monsanto and its terminator technology (DKSS, 2003: 2). In this diagnosis, the DKSS joined a loose national movement linking external threats to agriculture to multinational corporations and biotechnology. Monsanto was (falsely) attributed ownership of a patent on terminator technology, and (more falsely) of unleashing this bio-cultural abomination on India through field trials of Bt cotton. Terminator technology would in theory permit engineering of plants that could not produce viable seeds, generating a biological dependence of farmers on firms beyond that of commercial arrangements. Traditional practices of ‘selforganising’ agriculture would be replaced by dependency and cash nexus. This construction – linking multinational capital and globalisation to the cultural abomination of ‘suicide seeds’ – created a powerful political narrative. Paired with Dow Chemicals, which ‘brought us Bhopal and Vietnam’, Monsanto was said to be planning to ‘unleash genetic catastrophes’ (Asian Social Forum, 2003). Terminator imaginary persisted in Indian public discourse around biotechnology, demonstrating great power, pervasive reach and persistence in the face of disconfirming evidence. Biopolitics centered on this ideational construction cleaved coalitions seeking social justice and betterment of farmers. Suicides by debt-ridden farmers – most notably in Warangal district, Andhra Pradesh – were linked explicitly by activists to globalisation of agriculture and new seed technologies. Dependence of farmers on hybrid seeds of multinationals – rhetorically branded ‘seeds of death’ or ‘suicide seeds’ – linked field trials of transgenic cotton in l998 to the opening wedge of terminator technology in India. Seeds of Suicide was ‘dedicated to the farmers of India who committed suicide’ (Shiva et al., 2000). Chapter one of Vandana Shiva’s Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge is entitled: ‘Piracy through patents’. Dr Shiva’s over-riding concern with biotechnology is ‘the control of agriculture by multinational corporations’ (Shiva, 1997: 91). Activists burning field crops of Bt cotton trials called their movement ‘Operation Cremate Monsanto’. Terminator seeds were specifically banned by the government of India in 1998 in response, but the movement continued (Herring, 2005). Monsanto’s representative in India publicly refuted charges of suicide seeds: ‘Since the so-called terminator gene does not exist today in any plant in any country in the world, the question of its involvement in the field trials currently on in India does not arise’ (Dow Jones Agnet, 20 November, 1998). The Chairman of Mahyco, Monsanto’s Indian business partner, BR Barwale emphasised that the seeds being tested had been approved by the Department of Biotechnology for trials and have ‘nothing to do with the so-called terminator genes’. Monsanto’s marketing director for India argued that the farmers’ suicides had nothing at all to do with Monsanto’s Bt seeds (which were not even on the market), but ironically might have been prevented by its technology (Mistry, 1998). With transgenic cotton, he said, farmers would have had less debt from pesticide purchase and less crop loss to bollworms – less poverty, fewer suicides. More obviously, since the hybrid transgenics under Stealth Seeds 131