Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how plants resisting transgenic soy shape emerging bioeconomies in Argentina and Paraguay. Using comparative and ethnographic lenses that bring together frameworks in science & technology studies and environmental humanities, we develop the concept of interspecies resistance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how plants resisting the spread of transgenic soy in Argentina and Paraguay shape the technoscientific politics of genetically engineered (GE) plants. Using comparative and ethnographic lenses that bring together frameworks in science & technology studies and environmental humanities, we develop the concept of interspecies resistance to explore how different plants mediate particular social relations in emerging Latin American bioeconomies. Resistance to GE crops' appropriation of lands and bodies is steadily growing in Latin America. An array of people's movements has been surprisingly assisted by "super weeds", which have mutated and acquired biological resistance to pesticides accompanying GE crops. In Argentina, when activists throw "amaranth bombs"—mud balls with thousands of resistant amaranth seeds-- into transgenic soy fields, they leverage not only the mutant biology of amaranth as a "super weed", but also what we are calling "a productive slippage" with its edible and non-resistant variety. Amaranth, a sacred plant of the Incas as well as one of their most important foods, is equipped with power to take revenge on those who take over its land. In Paraguay, collective resistance becomes a "re-existence," a search for alternative forms of life, as peasants substitute GE-soy (what they call "killer beans") with indigenous plantations that they grow using agro-ecological knowledge acquired from Vía Campesina activists. In this context, global corporate attempts to suppress resisting communities of "super weeds," peasants, indigenous people, and activist groups through technologies of biological and social control reflect the blind spots of this bioeconomy.