How do farmers drive innovation trajectories of crop biotechnology?
Esha Shah – Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK

What I want to do is take the example of Bio-technology and touch upon some of the issues which we have been discussing since morning. One of the most important issues that have come up since morning is to understand the imaginaries by which the elite exert their social power, sustain and also reproduce it. What I want to do in my 10 minutes of presentation is to  raise few observations about how farmers in the western Indian state of Gujarat, not only appropriate, modify and employ the global knowledge of genetically modified  bio-technology, but in order to do that they also develop not only certain kind of social networks and social spaces but also a whole discourse. This discourse is what one can try to understand in order to see what kind of ideas, values, ethics that the elites cater to in order to justify certain types of practices that they have been historically following and also trying to continue with.

This whole discussion has two starting points for me. One is that, in India ,particularly both in academia and media, routinely the agency of good and bad of the bio-technologies is attributed to the multinational companies and also to the scientific establishments. We regularly hear these stories in the media and a number of academicians have also publicly said or rather blamed multinational companies for bringing foreign technology to India and by that means doing a number of evil things. What (point) I wanted to raise is that in these types of discourses farmers are usually imagined as passive recipients and victims of technological innovations somewhere happening far away in the laboratories in the western world.

There is another starting point for me to engage with what somebody might like to say pedagogy of the elites - is also the kind of debates that are more generic to the European contexts – I am referring here recent debates on the regime transition theories -- which  not only empirically draw upon the European experience, but they also discuss issues such as how certain technological regimes trajectories or paradigms, whatever term you want to use, emerge and sustain. Why certain technological paradigms are more powerful than others and what kind of actors and institutional alignments happen in order for certain technological trajectories to be more embedded in the social space, become more powerful, be more easily reproduced than the others?

Now my contention is that in both these debates, the effect of power and politics and the way they shape technological change is largely ignored. And that is what I would like to touch upon here.

To quickly give you a recap, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, BT cotton seeds were introduced two years before the official Monsanto patented BT cotton seeds were introduced. This happened through the illegal route. Dr. D.B.Desai of Navbharat Company reportedly stole a handful of BT cotton male seeds from the Monsanto Company . That became a basis upon which massive cultivation of BT cotton in Gujarat happened ,as I said, much before the Monsanto seeds were introduced. Thus, even after the Monsanto seeds were officially introduced, BT cotton was a very popular mode of cultivation in Gujarat.   

Now, officially 39 varieties of seeds have been released by the Indian Government -- not only the original seed which had CRY1 AB gene, but the second series of BT cotton seed which has CRY1 EB gene,  which has been known by farmers as CRY2 gene. The CRY3 gene is regularly rumoured. So you can see that the CRY has been very popular among Gujarat farmers.

Now what I want to do is to ask three questions here…one is : Who among Gujarat, which farmers among Gujarat are interested in BT cotton seeds and why?  I probably will not focus too much in my presentation . But there are two more questions that I want to raise here  or rather, make few observations about:
What are kind of social networks and social discourses do farmers employ in order to perpetuate and reproduce this whole technological paradigm?  The third question is also on the cognitive frameworks that the farmers employ. How, and by what kind of knowledge do farmers appropriate modify and then cultivate BT cotton seeds.

I will not go into the details of the first question on who cultivates Cotton and BT cotton here. I have dealth with it in one of my papers.Cotton is of course a legacy of the Green Revolution and BT cotton-a GM legacy. It is somewhere connected very clearly with nature as agency - namely two factors of nature which are very unpredictable - risky and uncertain are warmth and water. These two elements have shaped the cotton cultivation practices in Gujarat . This has been happening since  the late 19^th century, so it is almost 100 years of legacy.  I won’t go into the details, somewhere the GM cultivation is ipart of the path-dependent trajectory followed by the practices in the late 19^th century  which was the introduction of American varieties of cotton,  and then by introducing the Green revolution varieties which were the hybrid crosses of the American varieties. Thus the unpredictability of two issues of warmth and water  has determined the whole technological trajectory in a verycentral  way.

The question of who can cultivate BT cotton and cotton is also related to the access to land .  This is historically determined in Gujarat, where the community of upper caste Patel and the Thakur farmers historically had access to good quality cultivable land in Gujarat. Cotton being a high-risk crop is only cultivated in a certain quality of land which is largely owned by Patels and Thakurs. Having established that the crop bio-technologies have been chosen, shaped, modified, appropriated, and perpetuated by those who hold social power in Gujarat, I want to quickly touch upon: what kind of social networks and discourses that farmers employ and the cognitive frameworks.  In Gujarat, Dr. D.B. Desai (reportedly) crossed the Monsanto patented Bt male seeds with female of local hybrid varieties called GujCot8 and that became a popular variety which was called Navbharat 151 and for almost two-three years that’s the variety that was cultivated. But recently farmers by their own claim (and I have tried to ascertain this through other sources also) that they have developed independently 60 to 70 different varieties by crossing BT male with a number of local hybrid female varieties. Now how this happens? Usually this type of breeding in any institutional context would have taken 10 to 20 years whereas you could see that this experimentation that farmers have conducted has happened in a very short period of time which is say three-four years. In three to four years, farmers have developed number of varieties, cultivated them, abandoned them, created new varieties.  Now what is emerging in Gujarat is a scenario where there are different territorial spaces in Gujarat and also in Punjab ( Gujarat largely supplies BT cotton seeds to Punjab). There has been a territorial division among the different varieties, that means certain territories prefer certain varieties than the other territories. I will spare you  the detail of which territory prefers which varieties.

The question is that in what way is this knowledge being produced. Breeding first of all requires more than just the knowledge of the local varieties, where they are suitable etc. There is this hastened and fastened track of experimentation . I also found that there is a  common language of solidarity and communitarian  spirit  in 50 kms of the area where much of this experimentation is happening which is around Gandhinagar district in Mandsa Taluk (block). This is where a number of seed industries are located.  You will be really surprised the kind of language you repeatedly hear by almost all farmers living in a50 km radius.  I repeatedly heard from the farmers is that they claimed that the 'new varieties'  which they have developed are indigenous varieties. They called them “swadeshi” varieties.There is this common language that  binds them together  and which kind of justifies their actions.  And by doing that I don’t think that they really wanted to counter the monopoly of the multinational companies. But this was the means by which they wanted to overcome the constraint that the regulatory mechanism had put. The varieties they developed were illegal varieties and were not allowed to be cultivated. And also there was the whole question of patent and intellectual property rights.

This powerful group of farmers argued with the Chief Minister that these were Swadeshi varieties, indigenous varieties,  and the Chief Minister allowed these varieties to be cultivated within Gujarat. These varieties are not allowed to be exported outside of Gujarat but this nevertheless happen. This is the one discourse which they very powerfully and very effectively generated politically in order to get their way.  I expected them to  question the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) because their interest seem to be in conflict with IPR regime.  On the contrary, during  two of my visits,  in 2004 and in 2007, they did not challenge the intellectual property rights regime. In fact, they said that patents was the right way to go ahead. However  they created this alternative discourse of claiming these varieties were their own varieties and hence their own knowledge and hence they had the right to cultivate them as they wish. They say that, in fact we are doing a favor to the government by not asking any IPR on what we have developed.
So, one way in which power sort of operates is by creating common discourse by networks, by  speaking the same language  and generating  a very powerful discourse  in order to find spaces in which these people can claim access to certain kind of knowledge which normally they don’t have access to.

The other thing which  emerged very strongly when I visited in 2004 and had extensive interviews with number of these farmers who were cultivating BT cotton  for almost six to seven years, that was much before the Monsanto patented seeds were introduced, was that they were very upbeat and very positive about the BT Gene as such. There was this discourse which put BT Gene on the pedestal of immortality. At that time, there was also other parallel discourse where a number of scientists were concerned that if there  is an large scale illegal cultivation of the BT cotton ,  at some point the genetic legacy of the BT gene is going to be corrupted to the extent that it would no more be effective. When I discussed the farmers  what they felt about this, they the sort of  claimed  that BT male gene  which was used to cross with local varieties,  is immortal. The gene is never going  to  die and  and no matter what, it is going to last for at least 100 years.  That was the kind of upbeat mood in 2004. But when I visited again and interviewed the same farmers in 200, they rather complained about a massive attack of American Bollworm, the one which  was supposed to be taken care  of by the BT cotton seeds.  And farmers described this attack as ‘Lashkari eiyad – eiyad meaning worms - so to say worms that attacked like an army.

So that means there was something about BT that did not work. And when I tried to  dialogue with the farmers their previous idea about the BT male being immortal, (in fact this is the idea which 20 to 30 strong middle aged men tried to convince me in 2004,that BT male was completely immortal.) they were still upbeat. There was absolutely no sign of losing the heart or  even losing their optimism.  What they said was that - oh yes, something has not worked and we are sure that the scientist sitting in Delhi and also in Washington DC, and I quote here “Washington DC are working on this problem and they are soon going to come up with something". They also said that CRY1 AC gene didn't work but now thet CRY1 AB gene is there and it is going to work. So the male is still 'immortal'. It's never going to die. They again convinced me that. At that time there was this also talk about Chinese BT cotton seeds coming in the market which is called “Fusion” which it seems is was made by putting several different genes together. “'Fusion is the future” is the sort of slogan that I heard in English from farmers. 

I also had this extensive discussions with them about what the BT cotton is doing to the water problem in Gujarat and also to the cultivable land. The ground water in Gujarat is available at 1000 feet and it has by now gone to 1200 ft down. In fact much of Gujarat can be described as “a dark zone”which means ground water level gone into a level that it can never be raised or  it will take a very long time to raise.  And when I discussed with them  about the unsustainable practices that the BT cotton cultivation was supporting, I was told that "Well, this will last for one generation and that’s the time frame that we are thinking about; because by that time it will become a completely ‘unlivable’ area and our generation would have been dead" - in their own words, in their own acknowledgment .

What my conclusion here is that this powerful group of farmers who hold social power through historical legacy of 100 years have enormous faith in: 1) science 2) in the state 3) their own ability to maneuver any circumstances that would constrain them. On these three unshakable faith that they don’t want to engage with  any critic  or   any criticism of the current  paradigms  of technological development. Neither do they want to also entertain any question about “what if” or “what if there is a different future”.

For me these are the important issues to be discussed. The last thing I want to raise here also that in the global context, the knowledge development pertaining to the GM technologies is multi-polar and we have to understand the multiple ways by which the power operates here. The scientific establishment and the multinational companies are driving technological trajectories into one particular direction. But it is also equally important to understand that how these trajectories find roots and how they are being reproduced in a certain   socio-historical context. . Thank you.