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Politik des Wissens und Nicht-Wissens: Landwirtschaftliche Biotechnologie in Indien

Fachliche Zuordnung Humangeographie
Förderung Förderung von 2017 bis 2021
Projektkennung Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 378455085
 
Erstellungsjahr 2023

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

India's population is estimated to reach 1.7 billion by 2050 (UN DESA 2017). This development is accompanied by an increasing demand for agricultural products and a decreasing per capita availability of arable land due to urbanization and climate change (Kumar 2015). In this context, representatives of the Indian seed sector see the solution to these challenges in the development of transgenic crops with increased tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, which they believe will enable higher yields per unit of land, water, energy, and labor (Dibden et al. 2013). Bt cotton is the first and, so far, only commercially used genetically engineered crop in India. The technology, which was introduced to the Indian seed market in 2002, contains genes from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). By producing endotoxins from this bacterium, Bt cotton plants have a lethal effect on lepidopteran insects, such as pink bollworm, which pose a threat to yields in India's cotton growing states (Kouser & Qaim 2011). In this project, the scientific and political controversy over Bt cotton in Indian agriculture was studied. This controversy was understood as a conflict over knowledge claims that the actors involved make about nature, farmers, and technology. Knowledge claims rest upon a politics that decides what is considered valid and relevant information on the subject matter (Goldmann et a. 2011) and how to deal with non-knowledge, including deliberately ignored as well as completely unknown facts about biotechnology (Böschen et al. 2010, Wehling 2006). The project served to compare the socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim 2015) of government agencies and seed corporations with the vibrant materialities (Bennett 2010) that farmers experience in their working lives to reveal possible discrepancies. Theoretically, it was based on the integration of concepts from development geography and science and technology studies. The project comprised three work packages. The first one served to understand the historical legacies and imagined futures regarding genetically engineered cotton in India. The historical perspective showed that the cultivation of Bt cotton is reproducing central patterns (reliance on expertise and modern techniques; exploitation of small farmers) that were laid out in colonial times and perpetuated during the green revolution – even if the conditions of agriculture in globalized India are different today than they were then (Keck 2019). In terms of imagined 13 futures, it was revealed that government and industry officials are creating the imaginary of seemingly timeless facts about Bt technology to make genetic engineering attractive to voters and investors. This socio-technical imaginary rests upon explaining past successes through facts proclaimed as immutable over time about how the technology works and how farmers make decisions (Friedrich et al. 2022). The second work package was designed to assess the impact of Bt cotton cultivation on smallholder farmers in Telangana and to understand how the recent return of the technology's target pest, i.e. pink bollworm, is affecting farmers' livelihoods. A representative survey in three key cotton-producing districts of Telangana found that 80% of households surveyed had experienced a pest infestation in their fields in the past five years (n = 457), with already vulnerable households, particularly those with limited access to irrigation facilities, being the most affected. The study also found that Bt cotton never provided sustainable benefits to farmers, as some researchers had claimed (Sadashivappa & Qaim 2009, Krishna & Qaim 2012). The technology increases the evolutionary pressure on the target pest to develop resistance to the endotoxins produced in the genetically engineered crop. This, in turn, increases the pressure on consumers to buy more and more new products – and thus the risk of getting caught in a technology treadmill (Najork et al. 2021, 2022). The third work package was to study the Indian insect resistance management strategy as a mobile policy to uncover the responsibility of the state in the recent development of resistance of the target pest of Bt cotton. The study shows that the Indian insect resistance management strategy differs significantly from the successful strategy in the United States. Whereas the United States employed a multitactical strategy that relied strictly on planting refugia and then on moth dispersal, Indian authorities relied exclusively on refugia as the sole strategy. At the same time, they diluted this monotactical strategy by relaxing regulations. As a result, pink bollworm is now resistant to Bt cotton endoxins in much of India, while the pest has been completely eradicated in the United States. In addition, the study was able to show that planting refugia failed due to the precarious situation of Indian farmers, which pushes them to grow high-risk cotton monocultures in the first place (Najork & Keck 2022). Against this backdrop, the provision of financial incentives by Indian authorities could be an important means to achieve farmers' compliance with the instructions to grow refugia as well as the introduction of crop insurance and compensation payments in the case of harvest failures. Overall, the project has shown that, with respect to Bt cotton cultivation in Telangana, there are major discrepancies between the socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim 2015) of government and industry officials and the vibrant materialities (Bennett 2010) that farmers experience in their working lives. Fundamentally, this disconnect stems from the Indian government and seed industry's handling of Bt technology as a mere abstraction (Moore 2017) that neglects the dynamic interspecies relationships of cotton plants in their natural environment and the socioeconomic conditions under which farmers in India do agriculture. Given the deep historical roots of thinking and governing through abstractions (Keck & Flachs 2022), the project results speak for a new approach to agriculture that needs to start from the premise that nature, technology, and society are always entangled. Technologies whose commercialization is based on ignoring this interconnectedness are doomed to fail when it comes to finding long-term solutions to development problems.

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