www.checkbiotech.org ; www.raupp.info ; www.czu.cz

A new study in the February issue of Current Anthropology explores how the
arrival of genetically modified crops affects farmers in developing
countries. Glenn Davis Stone (Washington University) studied the Warangal
District of Andhra Pradesh in India, a key cotton growing area notorious for
suicides by cotton farmers, January 2007.

In 2003 to 2005, market share of "Bt cotton" seeds rose from 12 percent to
62 percent in Warangal. Bt cotton is genetically modified to produce its own
insecticide and has been claimed by its manufacturer as the fastest-adopted
agricultural technology in history.

Monsato, the firm behind Bt cotton, has interpreted the rapid spread of the
modified strain as the result of farmer experimentation and management
skill ? similar to mechanisms that scholars cite to explain the spread of
hybrid corn across American farms. But Stone's multiyear ethnography of
Warangal cotton farmers shows an unexpected pattern of localized cotton seed
fads in the district. He argues that, rather than a case of careful
assessment and adoption, Warangal is plagued by a severe breakdown of the
"skilling" process by which farmers normally hone their management
practices.

"Warangal cotton farming offers a case study in ?agricultural deskilling',"
writes Stone. The seed fads had virtually no environmental basis, and
farmers generally lacked recognition of what was actually being planted, a
striking contrast to highly strategic seed selection processes in areas
where technological change is learned and gradual. Interviews also provided
consistent evidence that Warangal cotton farmers prefer trying new seeds ?
seeds without any background information whatsoever ? to trying several
strains on smaller, experimental scales and choosing one for long-term
adoption.

The problem preceded Bt cotton, Stone points out; its root causes are
reliance on hybrid seed, which must be repurchased every year, and a chaotic
seed market in which products come and go at a furious pace and farmers
often cannot tell what they are using. Farmer desire for novelty exacerbates
the turnover of seeds in the market, Stone argues, and seed firms will
frequently take seeds that have fallen out of favor, rename them, and resell
with new marketing campaigns. For instance, one recent favorite seed in
several villages is identical to four other seeds on the market.

Stone argues that the previously undocumented pattern of fads, in which each
village lurches from seed to seed, reflects a breakdown of the process of
"environmental learning," leaving farmers to rely purely on "social
learning." Bt cotton was not the cause of this "deskilling," but in Warangal
it has exacerbated the problem.

"On the surface, [Warangal] appears to be a dramatic case of successful
adoption of an innovation," Stone explains. "However, a closer analysis of
the dynamics of adoption shows that the pattern some see as an
environmentally based change in agricultural practice actually continues the
established pattern of socially driven fads arising in the virtual absence
of environmental learning."

Strangely, in another part of India, a very different history of Bt cotton
has led to an improvement in agricultural skilling. In Gujarat, the loss of
corporate control over the Bt technology has led to an increased involvement
of farmers in local breeding, and an apparent increase in knowledge-based
innovation.

Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research,
Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on
humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on
human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating
across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of
areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as
ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and
linguistics. For more information, please see the Web sites:
www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA and [www.eurekalert.org]