Agricultural Biotechnology and the Information Economy

NOTE: This course ended in September 2022.

Course Description

The development of hybrid crops and subsequent plant biotechnologies, such as genetically modified (GM) tomatoes, are routinely touted as some of the most important scientific achievements of all time. Indeed, we agree that such developments are immensely important—not because they helped feed a world hell-bent on proving Malthus right (as the story usually goes…) but because they eventually led to a situation where farmers must purchase seeds from some off-farm interest instead of producing and saving their own seeds as they had done for most of agricultural history. Many scholars have argued that plant biotechnology is one of the core drivers—along with artificial fertilizer and farm implement mechanization—of industrial agriculture. Rural sociologist Jack Kloppenburg, in his magisterial First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000, argues that seeds are the “irreducible core of crop production” and were a major point of entry for agribusiness industry into agrarian operations.

The work of Kloppenburg and others has proven useful for critical studies of agricultural history and political economy. However, current theorizations of agricultural biotechnology have yet to be integrated with the vast amount of critical theoretical work that has attempted to conceptualize the so-called Digital of Information Age. The purpose of this short series is to engage in an analysis of the political economy of agricultural biotechnology using insights from critical studies of digital media. To do so, we will read McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto alongside Kloppenburg’s First the Seed. Wark argues that the rise of intellectual property (IP) creates a novel class division those that produce and use information and those that ‘own’ it and control access to it. By juxtaposing A Hacker Manifesto with First the Seed, we will engage in critical-theoretical cross-breeding and move toward a conceptually hybrid theory of agricultural biotechnology. Further, we speculate that an understanding of, for example, hybrid seeds as commodified information can expand our understanding of digital capitalism in the information age.

Key questions include:

How can Wark’s examination of digital capitalism provide critical insights into the political economy of plant biotechnology?
How does Kloppenburg’s study of the political economy of plant biotechnology inform our understanding of the information economy?
Can we understand seeds as information?
What happens when seeds become intellectual property?
Who should own the information to feed the world?

The short series will be held live on Zoom on Tuesdays from Aug. 23 to Sept. 20. The five sessions will feature discussions of sections from both books.

Schedule

Week 1: Hacking the Seed, Commodifying the Hack

•Wark: Abstraction, Class, Education, Hacking

•Kloppenburg: Preface, Chapter 1

Week 2: Commodification of Science

•Wark: History, Information, Nature

•Kloppenburg: Chapter 2, Chapter 3

Week 3: Hybrid Properties

•Wark: Production, Property, Representation

•Kloppenburg: Chapter 5, Chapter 6

Week 4: The State, Subsidies, Seeds, and (World) Systems