St. Louis, Missouri
March 12, 2007
By Neil Schoenherr
The arrival of genetically modified crops has added another
level of complexity to farming in the developing world, says a
sociocultural anthropologist at
Washington University in St. Louis.
Glenn D. Stone, Ph.D., professor of anthropology and of
environmental studies, both in Arts & Sciences, at Washington
University in St. Louis, has completed the first detailed
anthropological fieldwork on these crops and the way they impact
— and are impacted by — local culture.
The study, published in the February 2007 issue of
Current
Anthropology, focuses on cotton production in the Warangal
District of Andhra Pradesh, India, one of the nation's key
cotton-growing areas. There, Stone found several factors
affecting farmers' ability to adjust to new developments by
practical methods. Among them are the speed of change, the
overwhelming number of choices in the seed market and the desire
for novelty — all of which lead to lack of proper seed testing
by farmers.
"There is a rapidity of change that the farmers just can't keep
up with," Stone says. "They aren't able to digest new
technologies as they come along. In Warangal, the pattern of
change is dizzying. From 2003 to 2005, more than 125 different
brands of cottonseed had been sold. But the seeds come and go.
In 2005, there were 78 kinds being sold, but only 24 of those
were around in 2003."
Bt cottonseed, genetically modified to produce its own
insecticide, was introduced in India in 2002. Between 2003 and
2005, the market share of Bt seed — created through
collaboration between Monsanto Co. and several Indian companies
— rose to 62 percent from 12 percent.
Stone's research reveals that the increase resulted not from
traditional farming methods of testing seed for efficacy, but
from a pattern of "social learning" — farmers relying on word of
mouth to choose seeds.
"Very few farmers were doing experimental testing, they were
just using it because their neighbors were," Stone says. "There
has been a breakdown in the process of farmers evaluating new
seed technologies."
'De-skilling'
While Bt seed exacerbates the problem by creating yet another
option, the farming troubles predate its introduction. In the
late 1990s, there was an epidemic of farmer suicide in the
Warangal District. Many farmers are deeply in debt and have been
for generations.
Stone's study shows that the farmers' inability to recognize the
varying seeds being sold at market contributes to those woes.
The farmers' desire for novelty leads to rapid turnover in the
seed market. Seed firms frequently take seeds that have become
less popular, rename them and sell them with new marketing
campaigns, Stone says.
"Many different brands are actually the same seed," he says.
"Farmers can't recognize what they are getting. As a result, the
farmers can't properly evaluate seeds. Instead, they ask their
neighbors. Copying your neighbor isn't necessarily a bad thing;
but in this case, everyone is copying everyone else, which
results in fads, not testing."
Stone argues that the previously undocumented pattern of fads,
in which each village moves from seed to seed, reflects a
breakdown in "environmental learning," leaving farmers to rely
on "social learning." Stone refers to this situation as
"de-skilling."
"The bottom line is that the spread of Bt cotton doesn't so much
reflect that it works for the farmers or that the farmers have
tested it and found it to be a good technology," Stone says.
"The spread more reflects the complete breakdown in the cotton
cultivation system."
Agricultural Deskilling and the
Spread of Genetically Modified Cotton in Warangal
by Glenn Davis Stone
Current
Anthropology
February 2007
ABSTRACT
Warangal District, Andhra Pradesh,
India, is a key cotton-growing area in one of the most closely
watched arenas of the global struggle over genetically modified
crops. In 2005 farmers adopted India's first genetically
modified crop, Bt cotton, in numbers that resemble a fad.
Various parties, including the biotechnology firm behind the new
technology, interpret the spread as the result of farmer
experimentation and management skill, alluding to orthodox
innovation-diffusion theory. However, a multiyear ethnography of
Warangal cotton farmers shows a striking pattern of localized,
ephemeral cotton seed fads preceding the spread of the
genetically modified seeds. The Bt cotton fad is symptomatic of
systematic disruption of the process of experimentation and
development of management skill. In fact, Warangal cotton
farming offers a case study in agricultural deskilling, a
process that differs in fundamental ways from the better-known
process of industrial deskilling. In terms of cultural
evolutionary theory, deskilling severs a vital link between
environmental and social learning, leaving social learning to
propagate practices with little or no environmental basis.
However, crop genetic modification is not inherently deskilling
and, ironically, has played a role in reinvolving farmers in
Gujarat in the process of breeding. |
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