Paper short abstract:

Analysis of the political economy of GM soy agriculture in Argentina as both epistemic and social orders. Attention paid to both ‘micro’ perspectives looking at situated social experiments with farmers and their interrelations with ‘macro’ phenomena such as capital-labour relations and 'neoliberalism'

Paper long abstract:

Dynamics of promises and expectations with regard to technological developments, and their uptake, play a major role in shaping political-economic policies, institutional practices and wider societal mutations. This paper will address the political economy of GM soy agriculture in Argentina as both epistemic and social orders. I will engage 'micro' perspectives looking at situated social experiments with farmers and their interrelations with 'macro' phenomena such as capital-labour relations, forms of 'neoliberalism' and citizen-consumer hybrids. Once derived from the scientific knowledge produced by and concentrated in public institutions, I argue that epistemic authority over agricultural innovation is challenged by the emergence of a global farmers' identity empowered by farmers' experiential knowledge, oriented toward entrepreneurship, and supported by technological innovations, such as biotechnologies, no-till farming and precision agriculture. Epistemic claims of farmers becoming innovators-entrepreneurs reciprocally condition the rise of new social formations, particularly sowing pools operating under a networked business model of agricultural production based on capitalization, land concentration and 'salarization'. Under the pressure of agribusiness, agriculture goes beyond the commoditization of food and land toward the utter dematerialization, decontextualization and financialization of nature. In such a configuration, knowledge is elevated as a means of production more valuable than land itself, which tends to disappear from the agricultural equation and to reappear under a revamped sustainability logic overflowing the natural and territorial limits of lands.