Domestication of agricultural biotechnology within Argentina’s science and technology regime: the case of GM cotton

VAN ZWANENBERG PATRICK; ARZA VALERIA & FAZIO MARÍA EUGENIA

Buenos Aires

Conferencia; GLOBELICS 9th International Conference; 2011

Technologies, rather than being fixed at the design stage, are in important respectsreshaped and configured - or domesticated - as they are appropriated and used indifferent contexts and domains of use. In this paper we explore how the affiliate of amultinational seed firm has configured genetically modified cotton technologies, createdelsewhere, for commercialisation within Argentina’s agricultural sector, and how publicagricultural research and development institutions have contributed to, and attempted tocontribute to, this process. The empirical analysis is based on 24 in-depth interviewswith officials from the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) andrepresentatives of the multinational seed industry undertaken by the authors betweenJuly and September 2010. We find that the commercial development of geneticallymodified cotton technologies has been achieved in ways that are shaped largely by theglobal strategies of the parent firm, but that these are far from optimal in terms of theagronomic constraints and social contexts within which Argentina’s cotton farmersoperate, especially its smaller farmers. Public institutions have not been able toinfluence the domestication process largely because they have little capacity to do sounder prevailing intellectual property rules.