Gerardo Otero (ed.): Food for the Few: Neloliberal Globalism and Biotechnology in Latin America

Abstract

The social and ecological impacts of agricultural biotechnology are the subject of increasing concern in social science research. In particular, scholars critical of neoliberal restructuring point to the intersection between the ‘‘life science’’ project and the promulgation structural adjustments and political institutions necessary to open foreign states to investment, foreign markets to commercial products, and foreign ecologies to exploitation. Food for the Few: Neoliberal Globalism and Biotechnology in Latin America brings together 13 authors to explore these connections and their implications for farming communities, biodiversity and the distribution of power in Latin America. The volume, edited by Gerardo Otero, grounds the discussion in the Green Revolution to trace the historical and material lineage of the modern agricultural paradigm of which biotechnology is the latest addition. The book concludes, quite unsurprisingly, that the adoption of intensive, industrial models of agriculture is ‘‘having profound effects on agrarian social organization in developing countries’’ (292). Drawing on case studies of Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, the authors give the lie to the industry’s promise that genetically-engineered products are ‘‘pro-poor,’’ ecologically-beneficial (or at a minimum benign) and scale-neutral. Rather, these detailed empirical accounts document environmental and social injustice of proprietary biological organisms; or what Otero calls the ‘‘anti-poor technological dynamics’’ (293) of the corporate biotechnology project. Food for the Few begins by situating the effects of genetic engineering within the context of societies already suffering the impact Green Revolution technologies and the extension of the political economic and agricultural practices developed for the needs of the global North. The contributing authors then present wonderfully specific historical accounts of the regulation and social life of agricultural biotechnology in each of the major countries examined to draw insights that unite the experiences of agricultural communities across Latin America and the developing world. For example, Elizabeth Fitting (Chap. 6) documents how the displacement and migration of millions of Mexican peasants in the aftermath of NAFTA is leading directly to the loss of indigenous agroecological knowledge, decreasing in situ maize production and threatening crop biodiversity—a fact with significant local and global implications. The book’s crucial contribution is a geographic perspective lacking in current debates of biotechnology’s merits. For example, Kathy McAfee (Chap. 3) argues that genetically-engineered crops developed for temperate, industrial agricultures are fundamentally incommensurate with the cultural, ecological and social context of Mexican food production. Focusing on the unequal geography of scientific and political capital, Kees Jansen and Esther Roquas argue that the biosafety regulation in Latin America is marked by a persistent reliance on ‘‘absentee expertise’’ and structural and financial impediments to domestic research and development. Accordingly, it is hard, if not impossible to develop regulation that responds to the needs of individual Southern countries. Food for the Few makes a second significant contribution to discussions of the social mobilization against genetically-engineered crops. The chapters by Wendy Jepson, Christian Brannstrom, and Renato Stancato De Souza (Chap. 9) and Manuel Poitras (Chap. 11), in particular, highlight the opposition’s role in destabilizing the R. J. Roff (&) Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby BC V5K 1A6, Canada e-mail: rroff@sfu.ca