Andrew Flachs. Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in South In
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Andrew Flachs. Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in South India Tuscon, Arizona. The University of Arizona Press. 2019. ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3963-5 (cloth), Price $29.95 (Paperback). 240 Pages Rebecca Dudley 1 Published online: 8 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
In Cultivating Knowledge, Andrew Flachs examines cotton farming in southeastern India from a political-ecological perspective to assess the effects of global technological and economic pressures in cotton production on farmers’ agricultural knowledge. Specifically, he considers aspects of farming, such as seed selection and farming-as-performance, within social, political, and economic institutions. Focusing on two groups of cotton farmers in Telangana, India, one which cultivates genetically modified (GM) cotton (also referred to as Bt cotton, reflecting its genetic donor, Bacterium thuringiensis) and one which farms organically, Flachs provides a comparison between their responses to global agricultural trends. The former group relies on seed and farm input sellers to make decisions about what to plant and how to cultivate, while the latter are supported and constrained by non-governmental development organizations (development NGOs) on which they depend to maintain funding and which require them to use certain agricultural practices while demonstrating such practices in a public and educational manner. This ‘performative’ agriculture becomes a viable path for rural well being, Flachs asserts, because the NGOs in turn underwrite agricultural risk for farmers. Flachs argues that it is not the characteristics of the seed that primarily affects farmers’ agricultural knowledge, as agribusiness and development discourse might suggest, but rather social, economic, and political pressures that motivate and drive farmers’ decisions on seed selection. Cultivating Knowledge contributes to a vast agricultural literature and intersects multiple domains: agricultural * Rebecca Dudley [email protected] 1
Washington University, CB 1114, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA
economy, political ecology, rural and peasant studies, farmer decision-making and learning processes, culminating in what Flachs terms “theories of knowledge in contemporary agrarian life” (p. 8). He builds on both Rogers’ (2003) theory of diffusion of innovations, which places individuals’ capacity to learn at the heart of how technologies permeate societies, and on Scott’s (1998) theory of Indigenous knowledge production to address how institutional and social forces shape daily farming practices and knowledge (p. 45). This book will be relevant to anyone involved in South Asian agricultural development and will lend a valuable perspective on farmers’ decision-making processes (rather than local political organization or farmer experience). Cultivating Knowledge is a call for a nuanced analysis of farmer learning situated in politicaleconomic institutions such as neolibera
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