Global Rifts over Biotechnology: What Does India's Experience with Bt Cotton Tell Us

The primal global rift around genetic engineering is between agricultural crops and all other uses – such as pharmaceuticals and medicine. Agricultural crops alone have been segregated into an object of politics and governance termed ̳GMOs‘ (Genetically Modified Organisms). This framing is ensconced in contentious politics, law and trade, whether or not the cultivars are used in food. A second, and logically derivative, global rift divides rival advocacy networks supporting and opposing GMOs – that is, agricultural biotechnology. This rift is politically charged and administratively consequential. It hinges on two inter-related dimensions: bio-property and bio-safety. Global opposition forms around critiques of genetically engineered crops on both dimensions. New claims of intellectual property in seeds enabled by the genomics revolution in biology created conflicts over what can be owned, by whom, under what conditions, and in which nation. Claims of novelty by firms seeking intellectual property reinforce a further aspect of contention: if novel, might products of genetic engineering raise special risks in comparison with cultivars bred by different techniques? Transnational advocacy politics succeeded in framing ̳GMOs‘ as uniquely risky plants, with corresponding global soft law for special regulation. Farmers have responded to restrictions of both regulation and property claims with stealth strategies. The widespread adoption of Bt cotton in India illustrates why and how evasion of both bio-property and bio-safety regimes is pervasive globally. Such grassroots challenges to formal institutions embarrass both sides of the global rift; neither bioproperty nor bio-regulations prove so robust as antagonists in advocacy networks contend. The Indian experience also uncovers a fundamental contradiction in mobilization to halt diffusion of biotechnology in agriculture. Successful demands for stronger regulation of transgenics strengthen property-like rights of multinational firms that find it difficult to enforce their property claims in any other way. Bio-safety regulation often functions as bio-property. 1 V.T. Krishnamachari Memorial Lecture, Delhi University, December 2, 2009. This paper is a revised version of presentations made at Princeton University in February 2009 under the title: The GMO as Generative Frame: Global Networks, Contested Science, and Epistemic Brokers, and at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, The Vatican in May 2009, under the title: `Opposition to Transgenic Technologies‘. My debts to colleagues in India and elsewhere are deep and are expressed in my published work on this topic.