Ronald Herring

• Cornell University

James C. Scott’s prodigious work has influenced numerous fields of inquiry, often profoundly, as documented in this forum. This essay suggests how an extension of Scott's theoretical apparatus might provide fresh understanding of stalemated contentious politics of great importance to rural well-being.

Genetic engineering has created potential for moving medical and agricultural research and application frontiers forward in unprecedented ways. Despite its accepted use as a powerful tool in medical research, genetic modification and genome editing technologies remain controversial in large-scale ecological intervention and open-field agriculture....

Agarwala and Herring make the important observation that our view of class politics is often skewed by a misleading preoccupation with the patterns of class politics that arose in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. They develop this point by analysing the rise of India’s informal workers and its agrarian producers. After decades of being excl...

In careers that spanned six decades, Padma Bhushan award winners Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph elaborated seminal insights about Indian politics. The Rudolphs’ rigorous and remarkably empathetic study of India coupled with their extensive reading of social science theory served as the basis for their development of a broader interpretive mode of politi...

The political economy of agricultural biotechnology is addressed in this review through three puzzles. First, why were new crop technologies of the Green Revolution readily accepted, versus today's considerable blockage of genetically engineered crops? Second, why has genetic engineering in medicine and pharmaceuticals been normalized, whereas reco...

Agricultural biotechnology has been a project of India's developmental state since 1986, but implementation generated significant conflict. Sequential cases of two crops carrying the same transgene – Bt cotton and Bt brinjal (eggplant/aubergine) – facing the same authorization procedures produced different outcomes. The state science that approved...

Long-term stagnation in total factor productivity of major crops in Indian agriculture coupled with a price-incentive-based spurt in recent growth have been responsible for the reversal of secular decline in food prices achieved in earlier decades with the success of the Green Revolution. This article traces the demands for new technology in the co...

Much of the literature on agricultural biotechnology is agro-economic. How material facts on the ground relate to a unique set of politics determining deployment of the technology is less discussed. This article begins with the global rift over biotechnology in agriculture generated by national and transnational political forces. Rival sides of the...

Felipe Amin Filomeno, Monsanto and Intellectual Property in South America. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Tables, figures, appendix, bibliography, index, 208 pp.; hardcover $95, ebook, pdf. - Volume 57 Issue 1 - Ronald Herring

This book explores the complex interrelationships between food and agriculture, politics, and society. More specifically, it considers the political aspects of three basic economic questions: what is to be produced? how is it to be produced? how it is to be distributed? It also outlines three unifying themes running through the politics of answerin...

This book explores the complex interrelationships between food and agriculture, politics, and society. More specifically, it considers the political aspects of three basic economic questions: what is to be produced? how is it to be produced? how it is to be distributed? It also outlines three unifying themes running through the politics of answerin...

India is the regional leader in research and development (R&D) in agricultural biotechnology (agri-biotech) in South Asia. Commercialization of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cottonthe first and only commercial genetically engineered (GE) crop in Indiain 2002 was preceded by illegal cultivation and diffusion of unapproved cultivars, raising serious qu...

Genetic engineering in agriculture raises contentious politics unknown in other applications of molecular technology. Controversy originated and persists for inter-related reasons; these are not primarily, as frequently assumed, differences over scientific findings, but rather about the relationship of science to 'risk.' First, there are inevitably...

The case that the "triumph narrative" of Bt cotton in India comes mainly from economists, the biotech industry and their academic allies is a difficult one to sustain when dozens of studies show the positive effects of insect resistance in Bt cotton. Yields are driven by numerous factors, and there will be variance - field-to-field, season-to-seaso...

Given that the controversy over success and failure of Bt technology still exists, this paper discusses the available field studies that have addressed agro-economic questions of Bt cotton cultivation in India. Since a meta-analysis of studies can give only partial conclusions, owing to differences across study methodologies and coverage, this pape...

The purpose of this piece is to explore how we might go about understanding the political conditions for poverty alleviation via agrarian reform. It argues that the traditional conceptualization of agrarian reform and its politics-- which presents a near impossibility in typical political configurations-- is too limiting. The traditional economic f...

Unlike some global contentions - abolition of slavery, or universal franchise, for example - the rift over rDNA crops is not about ultimate values. Improvement of farmer welfare and enhanced sustainability of agriculture are universally valued goals. However, means to those ends are politically disputed; that dispute depends on alternative empirica...

I blame GM crops for farmers’ suicides. His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of Wales, October 5, 2008. COntentious Knowledge Claims: Miracle Seeds And Suicide Seeds. Why would Prince Charles famously declare that farmers commit suicide because of “GM crops”? At first blush, the declaration seems counterintuitive: Farmers have adopted transgenic crop...

Development assistance employs carrots and sticks to influence regimes and obtain particular outcomes: altered economic policies, democratization, relief of suffering from catastrophes. Wealthy nations and international agencies such as the World Bank justify development assistance on grounds of improving the global human condition. Over the last f...

Summaries The historical experience of the United States, where aggregate wealth multiplied in abundance but persistent poverty is glaring, offers concrete illustration that growth is not a sufficient condition for poverty alleviation in the transition from agrarian society. In contrast, the State of Kerala in South India abolished an agrarian syst...

The global political rift around agricultural biotechnology [“GMOs” in political use] hinges on two inter-related dimensions: bio-property and bio-safety. Genetic engineering in agriculture has enabled new claims of intellectual property in seeds, leading to conflicts over what can be owned, by whom, under what conditions. Firms seek strong intelle...

Science can say nothing conclusive about many important dimensions of the global cognitive and political rift on transgenic agricultural crops. Empirical studies will not answer questions in the realms of food preference, risk aversion, cultural constructions of rural society, or theology. But there are critical empirical questions and much empiric...

Abstract will be provided by author.

The surprising loss of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led national government in India's 2004 general elections has been generally understood as a rejection of the National Democratic Alliance's campaign that celebrated a ‘Shining India’ among voters who had not shared in the wealth produced by India's recent growth boom—especially Scheduled Cast...

The relationship between poverty and transgenic agricultural crops has created a global rift in development studies. Some, but not all, questions in this debate should be amenable to empirical treatment. Field studies have generated divergent numbers on yields and other agronomic outcomes. Studies from India come to diametrically opposed findings a...

Genetic engineering has enabled significant, accepted innovations in medicine and other fields. In agriculture, however, a global cognitive divide around 'genetically modified organisms' (GMOs) has limited the diffusion and scope of this technology. The framing of agricultural products of recombinant DNA technology as GMOs lacks biological coherenc...

Protest and Quiescence in a Dependent Welfare StateUnpackaging LiberalizationDevelopmental Interventionism in Sri LankaElectoral Response to the “Closed Economy”LiberalizationNutritional Security and LiberalizationExternal Support for Liberalization: From Carrots to SticksThe Quiescence PuzzleNotes

Cotton farmers in Gujarat, western India, faced a novel decision matrix when Delhi gave provisional approval, in March 2002, to Mahyco-Monsanto Biotech Ltd. to release three Bt-cotton varieties. These varieties represented India's first legally commercialised transgenics: official seeds. Unofficial transgenic seeds were also available to farmers bo...

The genomics revolution in biology has enabled technologies with unprecedented potential; genetic engineering is changing the terrain of development studies. Societies have reacted with indifference or appreciation to genetically engineered pharmaceuticals, beginning with insulin; yet for food and agriculture, a globally contentious politics and un...

Transgenic seeds in both India (Bt cotton) and Brazil (glyphosate-resistant soybeans) spread widely and rapidly through farming communities outside the reach of biosafety or bioproperty institutions. Stealth transgenics are saved, cross-bred, repackaged, sold, exchanged and planted in an anarchic agrarian capitalism that defies surveillance and con...

Though promoted by the Government of India, and endorsed by dominant international organizations concerned with agriculture, biotechnology has produced fierce resistance and divisions. “Operation Cremate Monsanto” combined nationalist appeals, opposition to multinational capital, and rejection of genetic engineering in one integrated critique. The...

Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics in South Asia. Yet in the subcontinent class has lost its centrality as a way of understanding the world and how it changes. Indian intellectuals have been a major force in the eclipsing of class through discursive strategies of constructivist idealism. Formalism in s...

It is puzzling how much the discourse of development has backed away from the seemingly central question of rural poverty: land. Elaborate rules concerning its distribution, rights, regulation, protection, utilities have multiple development objectives, but poverty alleviation, individual liberty and community revitalization have long been on the s...

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Interests" form a bedrock of explanatory structure in political economy, but are notoriously difficult to deduce from structure - though the practice persists. Interests are elusive: demonstrably contingent, malleable and situational, and filtered through cognitive screens that admit of less nomothetic solidity than the interests of structural acco...

Since its origin in Indian agriculture, cotton has been facing various problems with the most recent being a wave of farmers' suicides. But, amidst all the crises, cotton has a significant role in India's political, economic, symbolic and aesthetic culture. It carries beauty, meaning and identity. A country like India without cotton is unimaginable...

Development assistance employs carrots and sticks to influence regimes and obtain particular outcomes: altered economic policies, democratization, relief of suffering from catastrophes. Wealthy nations and international agencies such as the World Bank justify development assistance on grounds of improving the global human condition. Over the last f...

The politics of liberalisation is the politics of moving the boundary between authority and market as allocative mechanisms. Any existing pattern of state intervention must in some sense represent a vector sum of political forces that have been operative over time. Therefore, whatever the source of economic reform, moving the boundary towards marke...

El autor se propone explorar vías para entender las condiciones políticas que alivien la pobreza mediante la reforma agraria. Argumenta que la visión tradicional de la reforma agraria y sus políticas, prácticamente imposibles dentro de las configuraciones políticas típicas, es demasiado limitada. El enfoque económico tradicional es la intersección...

Academic and policy literature is replete with accounts of failure and cynical symbolic manipulation in the field of agrarian reforms. Kerala state in Southwestern India represents a significant exception, far surpassing the more publicized reforms of West Bengal. The argument is that the necessary conditions for structural change-primarily radical...

"In the last two decades, the politics of nature has emerged as an increasingly significant phenomenon at the local, nationstate and international levels, in both rich and poor countries and, increasingly, between rich and poor nations. We should not overlook the historical antecedents of resistance in the form of defensive reactions by peripheral...

Common property has been theoretically linked to environmental degradation through the metaphor of “the tragedy of the commons,” which discounts local solutions to commons dilemmas and typically posits the need for strong states or privatization. Though neither solution is theoretically or empirically adequate—because of the nature of states and na...

The transformation of forests to agriculture is a dominant theme in human history, previously associated with progress, increasingly associated with local and global danger. A workshop at the Smithsonian Institution brought together scholars interested in one very large and fragile deltaic forest system of international importance: the Sundarbans....

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. Mor...

Explores a fundamental problem in Communist agrarian strategy carried out in the framework of electoral politics. Notes that strategies which aim to give land to a tenantry through the abolition of landlordism ultimately break progressive rural alliances and exacerbate class conflicts between newly embourgeoised landholders and agricultural labour....

Consisting of twenty-five articles written by scholars and activists, this volume confronts the conflicts of rural India after independence. Encompassing both nation-wide and regional perspectives, the contributors provide a comprehensive, grass-roots account of the agrarian struggles facing all of India.

Identifies obstacles to increasing productivity rooted in existing structures of concentrated local power, and emphasizes three points. First, the stronger case for alteration of rural power structures is broadly developmental and political and cannot be made easily on narrow productivity grounds. Second, it is not the local power structure which i...

Numerous observers rightly term the landless rural population the ‘most intractable development problem’ in poor societies. Given the extraordinary political and administrative obstacles to redistrubution of rural assets in India (the widely-recognized failture land reforms), attention and finances have recently been focused on public rural employm...

The tenure reform policy model in operation in South Asia has generally failed to achieve its modest aims and has often led to net deterioration in the life chances of the class it claims to protect and rehabilitate. The causes for failure include the distribution of political power, as is frequently recognized, but as importantly include the natur...

Early in his tenure in office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto announced that his agrarian reforms would affect the lives of the common people of Pakistan more than any other measure contemplated by his avowedly socialist and populist regime. Almost seven years later, the martial law regime of Zia-ul-Haq issued a White Paper on the performance of Bhutto's gove...

Land reforms have often been viewed as a significant variable in the economic development of pre-industrial societies [10]. The economic rationale for reform is frequently given as an increase in agricultural output through improvements in resource use efficiency and cultivator incentives. But other goals are typically posited as well. An official...

Though promoted by the Government of India, and endorsed by domi- nant international organizations concerned with agriculture, biotechnology has produced fierce resistance and divisions. "Operation Cremate Monsanto" com- bined nationalist appeals, opposition to multinational capital, and rejection of ge- netic engineering in one integrated critique...

It is commonly said that the rural poor have been excluded by dominant paths of development. More accurately, the terms of inclusion have been adverse; when states and elites who run them have needed labor, taxes, or soldiers, the poor were included. That agrarian reforms have periodically altered terms of inclusion for the rural poor in substantia...

"The 'tragedy of the commons' has become a metaphor for a persistent and severe contradiction in the interaction of natural systems and social systems. Maximization of individual interests in the use of 'open access' common natural resources eventually degrades the commons to the detriment of all individuals. The classic formulation was based on th...

"The Joint Committee on South Asia has been working for a number of years, mostly in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution, on a project concerning applications of the venerable 'tragedy of the commons' model to specific instances of environmental degradation in South Asia. Several publications are in progress, focused on the case of the S...

"Nature policy typically involves a struggle with the market, which over time tends to extend commoditization to virtually everything ; regulatory logic limiting market dynamics has been a mainstay of environmental protection. Once 'nature' becomes conceptually commoditized as 'natural resources,' conservation competes with development as a frame f...