The Formation of Territories Free of Transgenics: Race, Space, and Mobilisation in Colombia

Abstract

AbstractThe transgenic expansion has situated land and territorial disputes at the centre of the transformations of the global agrifood system. Feminist critical scholarship has examined how states and multilateral organisations exercise top‐down power to promote extractivist agrarian models of development, showing how they have accelerated and intensified material and immaterial dispossession for already poor farmers across the world. In this article, I contribute to this growing body of inquiry by examining how racialisation is entangled with communities’ discourses and tactics to generate seed and agrarian counter‐territorialisation processes. I concentrate on the formation of Territories Free of Transgenics in Colombia among peasant and Indigenous communities. I show the possibilities for socio‐epistemic and territorial reconfiguration that they offer, as well as their limitations. I demonstrate the critical role that racial formations play in seed struggles and the reformation of agrifood systems from below and point out further spaces of inquiry.