Paper short abstract:

This talk discusses recent EU agriculture policy where a diversity of farming approaches and philosophies, from agroforestry to precision farming, are rendered technocratic to form a new (agricultural) technoscientific sustainability that in turn sustains the EU as technocratic political union.

Paper long abstract:

As boundary term, sustainability forms a meeting point which brings together actors from various sectors and interest groups. As aspired policy goal in times of growing environmental degradation, it has gained significance in that new actors in policy, industry and civic societies have populated the term in conflicting and overlapping ways. This talk discusses the reform of the EU Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) in the light of the Green Deal to analyze in a first step a growing diversity of toolkits to achieve a European sustainable agriculture: low-input approaches, like agroecology, are placed next to more high-tech methods, such as precision farming or gene editing. This requires rendering all tools/approaches technical and scientific to make them legible in a technocratic setting like the European Commission. In a second step, the talk shows how such agricultural tools, in the form of ‘digital technology’, ‘innovation’ or ‘science,’ are imagined as glues that hold together the holy triad of sustainability – the ecological, the social, and the economic. This technocratic flattening of diverse farming philosophies and approaches also speaks to a vision and aspired goal of the EU as a political union, despite or perhaps exactly because of its diversity (of member states). Analyzing these diversity-toolkit politics, including how new actors both conform with and contest the technoscientific rendering of farming approaches, offers insights not only into how a new (agricultural) technoscientific sustainability is shaped, but also how it coheres to, and thus is coproduced with the EU as technocratic political union.