Food Sec. DOI 10.1007/s12571-014-0400-2
BOOK REVIEW
Agriculture, Biotechnology and Development S. J. Smyth, P. W. B. Phillips and D. Castle (eds): Handbook on Agriculture, Biotechnology and Development. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, Glos., UK / Northampton, Mass., USA, 2014, xii 852 pp + index, ISBN 978 0 85793 834 3 H. Maat & D. Glover
Received: 1 October 2014 / Accepted: 8 October 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht and International Society for Plant Pathology 2014
To call a scholarly volume a handbook conveys a promise of the authority, completeness and balance that readers expect from a reference work. The editors of the Handbook on Agriculture, Biotechnology and Development have taken on an especially challenging task by attempting to compile a reference book on such a politically contentious topic. Since the emergence of recombinant DNA techniques in the late 1970s, their use in agricultural crop improvement has come to appear much more complicated than hoped for or expected. Stabilising a new genetic trait in a cultivar has turned out to be the easy step. Stabilising the new cultivar within a complex web of social, technical, economic and ecological linkages has proved to be something much more difficult to accomplish. Assessing the impact of a new technology on agriculture and fathoming the responses of societal interest groups and stakeholders are equally demanding. Succinctness is not an option. This book extends to almost 870 pages, including a useful index, and comprises no fewer than 51 chapters written by nearly 90 distinguished contributors. The individual chapters are generally concise, coherent and packed with information, many of them providing the kind of topical overviews one would expect of a handbook. Does the book as a whole achieve the same clarity and coherence? Let us first look at what has been done to order the terrain. The editors have adopted a formal framework based on ‘three interrelated, three-pronged approaches to assessing the relationships between agriculture, biotechnology and development’ (p.2). The first and third approaches are fairly clear and straightforward, inviting authors to distinguish between accepted science, current research, and ‘speculative pursuits’ (pp.2–3) and to be explicit about the models, methods and H. Maat (*) : D. Glover Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands e-mail:
[email protected] D. Glover Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK
metrics they used. So far, so mechanical; and these procedural guidelines at least imply that authors were asked to review their allotted topics fairly broadly. More central and more normative is the second approach, which was to adopt E. Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework (Ostrom, 2011) as a ‘superstructure’ for the volume (p.3). We find it hard to understand why the editors chose this framework, which implicitly defines the book’s topic as an abstract institutional, organisational or policy issue. It also implies that public choice theory and institutional economics, in which Ostrom’s model is rooted, are the key tools with which the topic ought to be approached. This means filtering out some important public, policy and ethical concerns about biotechnology and its interactions with agriculture and development, and demoting other disciplinary approaches to a secondary status. The IAD framework shows its value in the chapters where it is used, but is much less compelling as a justification for dividing the book into three discrete parts, corresponding to the framework’s three components: exogenous variables, action arenas and outcomes. For example, the last part of the book addresses the ‘outcomes’ component, resulting in an informative set of chapters on the adoption and impacts of transgenic technologies in particular crops or classes of crops. It is in these chapters that the editors’ ‘models, methods and metrics’ template makes most sense, and by and large the authors in this section have conscientiously applied it. However, this means that each chapter devotes space to a discussion of the types of econometric models and methods available to assess the impacts of transgenic crops, those that happen to have been used by scholars assessing the particular crop or crops under discussion in that chapter, the characteristics, strengths and limitations of these methods, and technical questions about how to handle particular issues arising from the types of transgenic traits under consideration. This has the advantage that the chapters can be read as independent works in their own right, which might be useful for some users
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of the book. But we wonder why these basic conceptual and methodological issues, vital for the analysis of the use of transgenic crops in general, were not given a chapter of their own, so that they could underpin the more empirical chapters and allow the authors to focus on their particular topics. This is the sort of thing we would expect a handbook to do: not just pile up historical narratives, case studies and quantitative data piecemeal, but show how they are connected, discuss the analytical tools and methods that can be used to make sense of their interactions, offer a conceptual language to interpret them and provide an ethical framework by which to evaluate them. Not surprisingly, these other matters emerged anyway within individual chapters. Examples are chapters by: L. Levidow (11), who highlights conflicts in the policies over agricultural biotechnology within the European Union; L.A. Jackson (15), on risk assessment in multilateral organisations; D. Eaton and G. Graff (28), on intellectual property rights (IPRs) in crop genetics; and D.E. Koladi (32), on international regimes governing IPRs in plant genetic resources and farmers’ rights. The editors’ formal structure of models, methods and metrics is not suitable for chapters like these, which range across technical, legal, political and ethical issues; and in these cases the authors concerned quite rightly have ignored it. To our surprise, the book lacks a general conceptual discussion of its three essential themes: agriculture, biotechnology and development. Biotechnology is narrowly defined as ‘genetically modified traits in an array of products’ (p2). This means that advanced non-transgenic biotechnologies are almost entirely neglected. GM crops themselves are portrayed largely as fixed and finished products whose composition and function have scarcely any relationship with the environments and locations where they are developed and used. For instance, chapters on the research environment within the public sector, by R. Gray and B. Dayananda (3), private sector, by J.E. Hobbs (4), or innovation clusters combining both, by D.J. Spielman, D.Z. Zeng and X. Ma (21), each provide an overview of organisational and economic aspects of biotech production environments, but readers will find no account of the kind of research and development (R&D) infrastructure particular technologies require or, vice versa, why particular research sectors or companies develop certain kinds of biotechnology and not alternatives. An interesting case in this regard is chapter 14 by C.G. Borroto on biotechnology in Cuba, presented by the editors as a demonstration ‘that lower-income developing countries can acquire and use the technology in ways that fit with their agroecological circumstances’, adding (with an eye on the IAD framework’s institutional concerns) that ‘[t]he challenge is to get effective leadership and governance systems in place’ (p.11). But chapter 14 actually makes clear that Cuba’s biotechnological successes involve very different technologies from the GM products, which the editors have defined as the book’s principal focus. They include diagnostic screening,
genetic analysis to support conventional plant breeding (known as marker-assisted breeding), biopesticides and biofertilisers to support disease control and promote plant and animal health, and the production of drugs and vaccines for livestock. In other words, it makes a substantial difference whether the technologies in question are GM crops or other, non-transgenic types of biotechnology, which are generally less controversial and contested than transgenic crops, and largely free of intellectual property restrictions. Unfortunately, neither here nor anywhere else in the book are the salient technical and political-economic differences among biotechnologies thematised. Even if one accepts the editors’ choice to focus on GM crops only, we expected to find a chapter explaining to general readers what biotechnology and genomics are. The book’s underlying problem is that it lacks a cogent, practical definition of technology that explains how the three themes of biotechnology, agriculture and development are connected. The IAD framework essentially takes biotechnology as an independent variable, in relation to which actors interact, issues arise, decisions are made and outcomes emerge. This inadequate conception of technology precludes the possibility of addressing the concrete technicality of what genes are, how they regulate plant and animal cells and how they interact within organisms. The popular portrayal of genes as simple biomechanical switches, as codes, blueprints or ‘genes for’ particular traits, misrepresents the complexity of stochastic molecular interactions, pleiotropic effects and epigenetics (Moss, 2003). This background knowledge is crucial to understanding the extents and limits of what genetic engineering can do, and helps readers to understand why it has cost so much time and money to commercialise just a few relatively simple transgenic traits. We suspect that many readers would value a clear exposition of what the genome is, and how genes can be manipulated (or not) and stabilized in a crop variety or breed of livestock. At a higher level of analysis, the book gives scarcely any attention to the ways in which genomes interact with different ecological environments (a single chapter title ‘environmental effects’ conveys the book’s linear, one-way conception of how transgenic technology interacts with different agro-ecologies). On a broader scale, little space is given in this book to the messy and complex materiality of farming practice. In other words agriculture, another core topic in the handbook, lacks a proper discussion. The ways in which GM crops are taken up and applied in agriculture are reduced essentially to the simple transactional concept of ‘adoption’. Alexander’s chapter on ‘adoption decisions’ (24) provides a helpful overview of the different ways adoption may be conceptualised and the indicators that can be used to analyse it. However, while her discussion reveals some glimpses into the complexity of farming and the diversity of farming communities, the chapter
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still accepts GM crops as black boxes. Adopters and nonadopters remain amorphous, homogenous categories. In a number of chapters these terms refer to entire countries, in others to agricultural sectors or farmers in general. Chapters in the last part of the book, exploring the impacts of particular GM crops or crop types, use predominantly model-based and statistical analyses to reduce the diverse experiences and behaviours of farmers and organisations to aggregated adoption numbers on national or sectoral scales. This lack of attention to the diverse experiences of farmers and the complexity of real farms encapsulates the absence of development, the missing third theme of the book. This comes to the surface, for example, in the book’s coverage of the topic of transgenic Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton. Bt cotton contains a gene derived from a common soil-dwelling bacterium, which makes the plant more toxic to certain cotton pests, principally a group of lepidopteran caterpillars known as bollworms. India has been the crucible of an intense dispute between supporters and opponents of this and other transgenic crop technologies, and the site of numerous academic studies on the adoption, impacts and surrounding politics of Bt cotton hybrids. M. Qaim (chapter 9) has been responsible for several of these studies and should be admired for the quality of his painstaking quantitative analyses. His conclusion, that ‘Bt cotton is a solution to some long-standing serious pest problems, and farmers are clearly better off with this technology than without it’ (p.136), is well demonstrated and clearly robust within a certain boundary of meaning. But Qaim also acknowledges that ‘cotton farmers in India suffer from erratic rainfalls and other conditions that can contribute to crop failures and social hardship’, and that ‘Bt technology is not a silver bullet for all these problems’ (p.136). Other scholars have explored these issues in considerable depth, both in India and in other locations, and it is disappointing that the handbook has nothing more to say on these important topics. In fact, there is a great deal more to be said about Bt cotton in developing countries than is included in this book. For example, readers will look in vain for any reference to studies by scholars such as D. Pemsl, H. Waibel, P. Yang, J. Zhao, S. Wang and their respective colleagues, who have demonstrated that pesticide consumption has sometimes remained high, or has even increased alongside the adoption of Bt cotton in China (e.g. Pemsl et al., 2011). The expectation was that pesticide use would go down because the transgenic plants produced their own inbuilt defences against insects. The observed increases may have occurred for several reasons, all of which are intricately linked to the manner in which Bt cotton was commercialised: information breakdowns; problems in farmers’ comprehension of the technology; market and regulatory failures; temporal, seasonal, anatomical and varietal variations in Bt gene expression; and the rise in populations of secondary pests, which are not targeted by the Bt toxin. The book also overlooks several other scholars
(e.g. M. Schnurr, B. Dowd-Uribe and E. Shah) who have shown how intimately patterns of the adoption and effects of Bt cotton technology hinge upon local socio-economic and institutional contexts and histories (e.g. Schnurr, 2012). Essentially, the development perspective is interpreted as the measurement of positive economic growth rates in agricultural sectors or nations. Key questions about global inequalities in wealth, research capacity, poverty alleviation and food security are scattered over various chapters. In chapter 31 C. Juma, P. Conceição and S. Levine address food security. They map out major patterns of global food production, undernourishment and malnourishment and discuss distribution issues in general terms. The chapter repeatedly states that biotechnology has the potential to improve each of these issues, but does not offer exemplary cases or analyse plausible impact pathways to sustain these claims. The authors conclude that realising such effects ‘will require reforms in institutional arrangements’ (p.502). What these arrangements should be ought to be the crux of the debate. The central question for biotechnology’s development potential is understanding how and under what institutional conditions the technology might have positive impacts on farms, farming communities and consumers. Chapter 44 by T. Raney, A.A. Adenle and I. Matuschke offers a general review of the impacts of transgenic crops in developing countries, in which the authors highlight the fact that Bt cotton’s short-lived success among small-scale farmers in South Africa depended heavily on a supportive institutional framework. They cite a well-known paper by Gouse et al. (2005), which characterised the technology as a ‘technological triumph but an institutional failure’. Raney and colleagues consciously pick this up in their chapter title, which asks whether transgenic crops in the developing world might be interpreted as an ‘Economic success but political failure?’ – that is, a good technical design whose success has been thwarted by public opposition, mischief-making by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and a lack of will by political leaders. But it has been pointed out before (among others by the second author of this review (Glover, 2010)) that it would be just as appropriate to label that case an institutional success while it lasted, and a technical failure when it failed, in so far as the technology had clearly not been designed to take into account difficult local agro-ecological conditions, especially a heavy dependence on irrigation, as well as severe socio-economic constraints on the farmers’ capabilities. Achieving the development potential of GM crop technologies depends critically on the conditions under which the technology is commercialised and concretely integrated into a farming and agricultural system. A scholar whose work is almost completely missing is G. D. Stone, who has investigated Bt cotton’s disruptive effects on farming skill in Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh (now Telangana), India. Stone’s long-term ethnographic study has shown quite convincingly
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that Bt technology represents a new step on a ‘technology treadmill’ that is progressively undermining farmers’ ability to understand and manage their cotton crop, and to incorporate new technology in ways that maximise its potential benefits and avoid its pitfalls. A rapid turnover in hard-to-distinguish seed varieties and brands and a cacophonous information environment are driving wild fluctuations in demand for particular seeds, and highly localised seed fads that are entirely unexplained by variations in the agronomic performance of particular seeds (Stone, 2010). Stone’s analysis explains in detail the dependence of Bt cotton’s technical performance on well-functioning markets and regulatory systems. To produce benefits, the ‘Bt gene’ must be incorporated into suitable germplasm, made available to farmers through accessible channels and cultivated in appropriate ways. Farmers need information from various sources to help them make the most of the technology, including knowledge about its limitations and the ability to respond when things are going wrong. Contrary to naïve rhetoric, GM technology is not encapsulated within the seed at all, but is expressed by farmers in their farming practices. Stone is one of only a few scholars to have investigated the breakdown in farmer ‘skilling’ associated with transgenic crops. It is a missed opportunity that he is not a contributor to this volume and that his work is cited, in passing, in only a few of the chapters. Triggering a positive developmental effect is a challenge inherent in the introduction of any new technology, not just biotechnology or GM crops; but that makes it even harder to understand why the editors of the handbook have not given this issue a more prominent place. Another missing topic is an exploration of the perceptions, preferences and priorities of farmers. The book includes one chapter on ‘engaging publics on agbiotech’ (chapter 33 by J. Medlock and E. Einsiedel), but this otherwise useful and informative chapter concentrates on citizens’ juries, consensus conferences and other deliberative forums that have been convened in wealthy countries, where farmers generally make up a small minority of the population. In these settings, Medlock and Einsiedel show that public attitudes towards agricultural biotechnologies are rarely entirely negative or positive, but qualified. In other words, most people do not give a general yes or no to transgenic technologies, but want to discuss the purposes for which the technology is developed, associated conditions and safeguards, and how the benefits are distributed. Studies of the attitudes of farmers and consumers in developing countries have been carried out by various scholars (e.g. Pimbert and Wakeford, 2003; Wakeford and Pimbert, 2004; Soleri et al., 2008; Macnaghten et al. 2014). In these reported cases, small-scale farmers were considerably less comfortable with and confident about transgenic crop technologies than one would realise from a glance at the econometric adoption studies. In relation to broader public debates and controversies, the handbook does include chapters that pay attention to
conflicting societal interests and resistance to biotechnology applications. Several chapters deal with the opposition of NGOs and environmental activists to general or specific uses of GM crops. In chapter 30, W. E. Huffman and J. J. McClusky discuss studies tracing how consumers find their way in ‘markets with greatly conflicted information’ (p.467), focusing particularly on food labels. Their chapter is informative and gives a solid overview of relevant studies. The focus, however, is entirely on ‘western’ consumers, not addressing any development issues. Closer to key development questions is R. Paarlberg’s chapter (12) on ‘African non-adopters’. The chapter reproduces the argument of his book Starved for Science (Paarlberg, 2008), including its partial and selective interpretation of Africa’s political and regulatory struggles with transgenic crops and foods. Paarlberg’s well-rehearsed complaint is that African countries have failed to adopt transgenic technologies because of the pernicious and illegitimate influence of foreign NGOs and environmental activists, primarily from Europe. Paarlberg argues that Africa’s regulatory regime for GMOs is disproportionately stringent because foreign donors, as well as out-of-touch and uncaring domestic political elites, have made it so. He pays scarcely any attention to the influence of competing forces in the opposite direction: the USA’s long-standing support for the Agriculture Biotechnology Support Programme (ABSP I and II) and the Programme for Biosafety Systems, for example, as well as particular initiatives such as the collaboration between Monsanto and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute to bring transgenic sweet potatoes to eastern Africa. He does not mention the USA’s use of aid as a lever to encourage recipient nations to adopt regulations that are congenial for the introduction of biotechnology. Nor does he have anything to say about the US government’s behind-the-scenes efforts to influence African governments’ postures towards GM as revealed in the mass of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in 2010 (Schnurr, 2013). Readers wanting to fill the gaps in Paarlberg’s account may turn to the useful chapter 22 by W. O. Hennessy, A. Gupta and S. P. Kowalski, who describe precisely how technology transfer and capacity building projects, many of them backed directly or indirectly by the US government as well as other international donors, serve as vehicles to encourage African and other nations to adopt permissive policies towards transgenic crop technologies. Other chapters on related topics display a similar lack of balance in discussing the influence of NGOs and activists. In this area, we find the editors have overlooked several violations of their injunction to distinguish between established science, current research and speculative pursuits. For example, C. D. Ryan’s chapter (35) praises Monsanto’s ‘strategically conceptualized corporate campaign’ of newspaper advertising, which was carefully designed to influence opinionformers in Europe (p.553), yet when anti-GM campaigners in
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turn have tried to influence public opinion she condemns them for ‘mythmaking’, implying that there is something underhand and unfair about their success in using social media and other channels to mobilise public disquiet about transgenic technologies. Numerous other scholarly articles (including some of the other chapters in this handbook) have pointed out that mythmaking, half-truths, and scaremongering have been inserted into the public arena by parties in favour of GM technology just as much as by those opposing it (Stone, 2002, Stone and Glover, 2011). P. Aerni’s chapter (256) ploughs a similar furrow in its analysis of ‘organized public resistance’, implying that there is something sinister about a public campaign being coordinated, as if the effort to promote transgenic technologies were itself unorganised. In fact, the biotechnology corporations’ communications effort is coordinated, sophisticated and very well-resourced; and so is that of some large international NGOs. Both pro-GM and anti-GM advocacy groups have the legitimacy that comes from representing a societal interest, and the freedom to mount campaigns. Each has its ways of building arguments, making claims, and representing facts. But both suffer from a democratic deficit and neither has a monopoly on truth or virtue. Remarkably, Aerni does not limit himself to criticising NGOs, even insinuating that the eminent climate scientist Prof. Robert Watson – formerly Chief Scientist at the World Bank and UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), scientific advisor to the Global Environment Facility (GEF), chair of both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) and holder of half a dozen other senior roles – has jumped into bed with the anti-GM campaigners (p. 263). Watson has publicly doubted that transgenic crops can play an important role in addressing future challenges in food security and climate change, and readers might think that his long career qualifies him to form a reasoned view on the matter. And, though Aerni evidently disagrees with Watson’s opinion, which he calls ‘a vehement rejection’, he does not explain exactly why he thinks Watson is wrong. Our criticisms of the inadequate treatment of the development theme of the book may be accounted for by referring to the list of contributors. The book is largely written by individuals based in the USA and Canada, and a few Europebased authors, most of them in Germany and Switzerland. A small minority of the contributors come from the less developed countries, including two each from China, South Africa, Burkina Faso and the Philippines, and one from Cuba. India, Mexico and Brazil are surprising omissions from the list of authors’ affiliations. The India chapter is written by a German professor; Brazil and Argentina are covered together by a USA expatriate based in Argentina; while a chapter on Latin
American non-adopters of transgenic crops is written by a Honduran expatriate based in Washington DC, USA. Evidently, this book about agricultural technology and development is very much a book dominated by the perspectives of Northern scholars and institutions. This is not exclusively the Canadian editors’ nor the authors’ fault, as it reflects the prevailing unevenness in the way academic power and quality are dispersed globally. Yet inescapably it means that the voice of ‘Southern’ scholars, and especially the diversity of perspectives within developing countries, is underrepresented in this book. In spite of our criticisms of the book as a whole and of individual chapters, there is useful material in this handbook. Many of the chapters, especially in the middle section of the book, are informative and well-written, and provide a good introduction to various important topics. We enjoyed reading it and learned from it. The book will be useful to newcomers to the field, including students, journalists, and political consultants who need a rapid introduction to this complex technical, legal and political arena. Nonetheless, this volume does not really deserve to be called a handbook, and if it is used as an authoritative reference work then readers will be shortchanged; it does not cover the field in sufficient breadth or depth, nor with the right degree of balance.
References Glover, D. (2010). Exploring the Resilience of Bt Cotton’s “Pro-Poor Success Story”. Development and Change, 41(6), 955–981. Gouse, M., Kirsten, J., Shankar, B., & Thirtle, C. (2005). Bt cotton in KwaZulu Natal: technological triumph but institutional failure. AgBiotechNet, 7, 1–7. Macnaghten, P., Carro-Ripalda, S., & Burity, J. (Eds.). (2014). A New Approach to Governing GM Crops: Global Lessons from the Rising Powers. Durham UK: Durham University Working Paper. Moss, L. (2003). What Genes Can’t Do. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Ostrom, E. (2011). Background on the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework. Policy Studies Journal, 39(1), 7– 27. Paarlberg, R. (2008). Starved for science: how biotechnology is being kept out of Africa. Cambridge: MA and London, Harvard University Press. Pemsl, D. E., Voelker, M., Wu, L. F., & Waibel, H. (2011). Long-term impact of Bt cotton: findings from a case study in China using panel data. International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, 9(4), 508– 521. Pimbert, M., & Wakeford, T. (2003). Prajateerpu, Power and Knowledge: The Politics of Participatory Action Research in Development. Part 1. Context, Process and Safeguards. Action Research, 1(2), 184– 207. Schnurr, M. A. (2012). Inventing Makhathini: Creating a prototype for the dissemination of Genetically Modified crops into Africa. Geoforum, 43(2), 784–792. Schnurr, M. A. (2013). Biotechnology and bio-hegemony in Uganda: unravelling the social relations underpinning the promotion of genetically modified crops into new African markets. The Journal of Peassant Studies, 40(4), 639–658.
H. Maat, D. Glover Soleri, D., Cleveland, D. A., Glasgow, G., Sweeney, S. H., Cuevas, F. A., Fuentes, M. R., & Humberto Rios, L. (2008). Testing assumptions underlying economic research on transgenic food crops for Third World farmers: Evidence from Cuba, Guatemala and Mexico. Ecological Economics, 67(4), 667–682. Stone, G. D. (2002). Both Sides Now: Fallacies in the Genetic Modification Wars, Implications for Developing Countries, and Anthropological Perspectives. Current Anthropology, 43(4), 611– 630.
Stone, G. D. (2010). Field versus Farm in Warangal: Bt Cotton, Higher Yields, and Larger Questions. World Development, 39(3), 387–398. Stone, G. D., & Glover, D. (2011). Genetically modified crops and the “food crisis”: discourse and material impacts. Development in Practice, 21(4–5), 509–516. Wakeford, T., & Pimbert, M. (2004). Prajateerpu, Power and Knowledge: The Politics of Participatory Action Research in Development. Part 2. Analysis, Reflections and Implications. Action Research, 2(1), 25–46.
