Abstract
The transnational spread of law and technology in Indian agricultural development has passed through three distinct phases since the mid-19th century. In each case, a narrative of agrarian crisis allowed for new state and corporate interventions, conceived by American and British agribusiness, within the existing logics of Indian smallholder agriculture. These begun with colonial British industrial cotton projects in the 1840s, continuing with Green Revolution agriculture, and on contemporary GM and organic cotton farms. In each case, farmers developed strategies through a frictive, contentious adoption of new technologies and built new avenues to success that worked for some farmers and failed for others. In this article I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and household surveys conducted in nine villages from 2012-2014 in Telangana, India. As with previous development initiatives, the US-born legal structures that defined high-tech GM and low-tech organic agriculture were adopted in India without major changes. I argue, however that their actual implementation by farmers has required a significant shift in the ways that people manage the agricultural economy.Keywords: Genetically Modified crops, organic agriculture, development, South India This paper was winner of the Eric Wolf Prize, Political Ecology Society, 2015.
Highlights
India's Agricultural Needs are Rising (Monsanto India Website, 2012)We choose villages which are in deep crisis
Even when the regulation or technology arrives unchanged from foreign planners, farmers create new paths toward success within the reward structure of these agricultural regimes. This adaptation becomes clearest when we focus on how farmers make seed decisions under the new constraints and opportunities afforded to them by Genetically modified (GM) and organic agriculture
The colonial, green revolution, and genetically modified stages of cotton development have all been characterized by a gradual shift toward industrial logics (Fitzgerald 2003): an emphasis on profit, commodified inputs, and the consolidation of knowledge with off-farm experts
Summary
We choose villages which are in deep crisis. That's the first target we have. (Organic Agriculture NGO Director, 2014 interview). Guha 2008; Perkins 1997), setting the stage for the current spread of organic and GM technologies into India These agricultural regimes have wrought significant changes for Telangana farm work because they changed the agricultural reward structure for local farmers. To presume that the adoption of new technology, ranging from GM seeds to organic compost is a natural communal response obscures the complex interactions of personality, opportunism, alliance, oppression and social stratification of daily life in agrarian India (Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan 2000) and of the daily practice of agricultural knowledge. I conclude by suggesting that these agricultural performances are a form of friction (Tsing 2005), by which development efforts unintentionally opened new avenues that allowed farmers to reap material and social benefits and allowed others to fail to do so
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