Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India (Global Change / Global Health)

A single seed is more than just the promise of a plant. In rural south India, seeds represent diverging paths toward a sustainable livelihood. Development programs and global agribusiness promote genetically modified seeds and organic certification as a path toward more sustainable cotton production, but these solutions mask a complex web of economic, social, political, and ecological issues that may have consequences as dire as death. In Cultivating Knowledge anthropologist Andrew Flachs shows how rural farmers come to plant genetically modified or certified organic cotton, sometimes during moments of agrarian crisis. Interweaving ethnographic detail, discussions of ecological knowledge, and deep history, Flachs uncovers the unintended consequences of new technologies, which offer great benefits to somebut at others expense. Flachs shows that farmers do not make simple cost-benefit analyses when evaluating new technologies and options. Their evaluation of development is a complex and shifting calculation of social meaning, performance, economics, and personal aspiration. Only by understanding this complicated nexus can we begin to understand sustainable agriculture. By comparing the experiences of farmers engaged with these mutually exclusive visions for the future of agriculture, Cultivating Knowledge investigates the human responses to global agrarian change. It illuminates the local impact of global the slow, persistent dangers of pesticides, inequalities in rural life, the aspirations of people who grow fibers sent around the world, the place of ecological knowledge in modern agriculture, and even the complex threat of suicide. It all begins with a seed. Cover 1 Series 3 Title page 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 List of Illustrations 8 Acknowledgments 10 1. Cotton, Knowledge, and Agrarian Life in Telangana 16 2. The Political Ecology of Knowledge in Indian Agricultural Development 47 3. Cotton Colonialism, Cotton Capitalism 71 4. False Choices: The Problem with Learning on GM Cotton Farms 95 5. Opportunism, Performance, and Underwriting Vulnerability on Organic Cotton Farms 128 6. Performing Development: Practice, Transformation, Suicide 156 7. Redefining Success in Telangana Cotton Agriculture 184 References 208 Index 232 About the Author 240 This dissertation explores the ways in which genetically modified (GM) cotton seeds, rice seeds, and organic cotton seeds in Telangana, India set farmers on diverging economic, environmental, and social trajectories. GM cotton, a cash crop sold under hundreds of different brand names by private corporations, leads farmers to rapidly change to new seeds and copy their neighbors' choices as they chase high yields that counter their high investments in an input-intensive agriculture "An ethnography of rural farmers in India that brings to light the devastating consequences of large agrobusiness. This book is the first in the new Global Change / Global Health series"-- Provided by publisher