The patent and the freezer: putting agrarian facts in their place

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper is a reflection on the growth and decline of Paraguayan scientific institutions associated with the Green Revolution. Paraguay had almost no scientific infrastructure in 1943, when American investors and politicians began a massive program to generate national expertise to fuel an export boom. This would be mirrored in the 1990s by disinvestment, personified in this paper by the demise of a vital freezer that was storing corn samples at one of the country’s primary research centers. The paper follows this story by focusing on four of the key crops of Paraguayan agrarian research: cotton, maize, wheat, and soybeans. Each of these crops in their time articulated ambivalent interests between those of the Paraguayan nation, and the global ambitions of foreign Green Revolutionaries. By showing the way that the latter interests slowly took over from the former (culminating in the patent regimes around genetically modified soybeans), the paper also traces the rising importance of “facticity” in local agrarian science.