Cultivating Knowledge

Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India

A single seed is more than just the promise of a plant. In rural south India, seeds represent diverging paths toward a sustainable livelihood. Development programs and global agribusiness promote genetically modified seeds and organic certification as a path toward more sustainable cotton production, but these solutions mask a complex web of economic, social, political, and ecological issues that may have consequences as dire as death.

In Cultivating Knowledge I show how rural farmers come to plant genetically modified or certified organic cotton, sometimes during moments of agrarian crisis. Interweaving ethnographic detail, discussions of ecological knowledge, and deep history, this book uncovers the unintended consequences of new technologies, which offer great benefits to some—but at others’ expense. Farmers do not make simple cost-benefit analyses when evaluating new technologies and options. Their evaluation of development is a complex and shifting calculation of social meaning, performance, economics, and personal aspiration. Only by understanding this complicated nexus can we begin to understand sustainable agriculture.

By comparing the experiences of farmers engaged with these mutually exclusive visions for the future of agriculture, Cultivating Knowledge investigates the human responses to global agrarian change. It illuminates the local impact of global changes: the slow, persistent dangers of pesticides, inequalities in rural life, the aspirations of people who grow fibers sent around the world, the place of ecological knowledge in modern agriculture, and even the complex threat of suicide. It all begins with a seed.

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"Meticulously following cotton farmers’ lives and decisions in India, this page-turning book should be in the hands of anyone who confronts the puzzle of genetically modified crops and development. By eschewing both the Promethean promise or the apocalyptic bane typically ascribed to GMOs, Flachs has done what few other could, mapping the labyrinth of relationships between hard choices, diverse knowledges, and runaway markets."— Paul Robbins, author of Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are

"In extraordinarily beautiful prose regarding a complex and sometimes heartbreaking issue, Andrew Flachs offers us the deepest look yet available of how the adoption of GM seeds affects communities' aspirations, livelihoods, values and identities in rural areas of the developing world. This book is far more than an academic treatise on cotton economies in South India. It provides us with a lens by which to examine how to determine what kinds of (bio-)technological changes generate more collateral damage than benefits to rural cultures and their traditional agrarian knowledge. At the same time, it re-positions such traditional knowledge and values not as some obsolete nostalgic carryover from the past, but a key element of resilience for communities of the future. Flachs has synthesized his insights into such critically-important issues into a memorable narrative that will linger with readers as a guide to how we deal with biotech revolution, and whether they will really make the world more green, or more filled with the blues."—Gary Paul Nabhan, author of Food from the Radical Center

“Through a richly nuanced ethnography of cotton producers in Telangana, Flachs provides key insights on how farmers accumulate knowledge and make decisions in desperately tough conditions. Taking forward Paul Richard’s idea of ‘agriculture as a performance’ in revealing directions, Flachs offers an innovative synthesis of anthropology and political ecology to cast new light on the role of biotechnology and the meaning of sustainability within rural India.”— Marcus Taylor, author of The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation: Livelihoods, Agrarian Change and the Conflicts of Development

"This wonderfully informative and beautifully written book addresses important and controversial questions—the impact of genetically modified crops and organic farming methods on Indian agriculture and an apparent epidemic of farmer suicides—from the carefully contextualised perspective of the ethnographer, and drawing on perspectives from anthropology and political ecology. Old opposed certainties are seen in a new light as being much less cut-and-dried than embattled opponents assume. New technology is neither good nor bad. What matters most is the context. In particular, the rights and wrongs of agricultural transformation have to be seen in terms of the dynamics of social and political life in farming communities attempting to adapt to changing markets, technologies and environmental circumstances. These transformations depend on the capacity of communities to understand, to learn, to cope, and to impose their own perspectives in the face of challenges set by larger external forces. Sometimes the scope for local social agency is high, and communities prosper—irrespective of the technical regime. In other cases, life chances, learning opportunities and performance spaces are sharply narrowed, and disillusion and despair result. Flachs brings a musician's sensibility to understanding the multiple performative ways in which agricultural technologies are enacted in social life, and why they work for some but fail for others. Far from drawing partisan policy conclusions the book ends by calling for a greater sense of pragmatic solidarity as the key to agrarian technical transformation. Argue less, dance more."—Paul Richards, Emeritus Professor of Technology and Agrarian Development, Wageningen University, The Netherlands

"Cultivating Knowledge updates us on the exigencies facing cotton farmers in the Andhra Telangana region, illuminating the choices available to cotton farmers in the region who are living precariously."—Debarati Sen, author of Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling

The Global Lives of Indian Cotton

The Global Lives of Indian Cotton is an international digital humanities storytelling project to describe the full cotton commodity chain from seed to second-hand clothing. Using Esri Storymap software, this website allows visitors to explore cotton’s ties around the world in the words and photos of the people who create it <link>

Scholarly Reviews for Cultivating Knowledge

Agricultural History <Link>

Deploying multiple methods from the anthropological staples of participant observation and interviews to GIS modeling and in-depth surveys, Flachs expertly probes how these technologies enter into and shape farmers’ lives in the cotton belt of southeast India. The agrarian crisis in India—evidenced in widespread rural indebtedness and farmer suicides—forms the backdrop to this discussion. Yet Flachs is careful to situate the current crisis within legacies of colonial and postcolonial development, arguing that it is not cotton itself that has caused distress but rather generational poverty, rural inequalities, and the commodification of knowledge, alongside rising rural aspirations.

The American Association of Geographers Review of Books <Link>

Ever since its introduction in India in 2002, GM cotton has been the subject of a bitter controversy between supporters, who have credited it with a threefold increase in cotton yields over the following decade to the benefit of smallholder livelihoods, and opponents, who view these laboratory-designed crops as environmentally toxic, a danger to human health due to pesticide residues, and responsible for the loss of local farmer knowledge and agency. Andrew Flachs’s study is a timely and crucial contribution to the debate…What particularly sets this work apart from other studies devoted to GM cotton is the use of a comparative method whereby the experiences of GM cotton farmers are compared with those of smallholders who have moved to organic cotton cultivation. As the GM and organic opposition is also the main ideological fault line in current approaches to Indian agriculture, with each being offered as the solution to the challenges faced by smallholders, this method gives a voice to local farmer experiences of cotton seed choices and of these contrasting value systems espoused in the process.

American Anthropologist <Link>

Cultivating Knowledge offers an important anthropological intervention into studies of technology adoption, political ecology, and critical agrarian studies. Flachs makes the powerful case that sustainability must be assessed socially, rather than technologically…He thus illuminates how farmers’ decisions and calculi of success in assessing particular seeds and development schemes are mediated through performances of knowledge that are shaped by gendered, caste, class, and other hierarchies of power. Theoretically sophisticated, while also accessible for undergraduates, Flachs ultimately provides a fresh perspective on the politics and performance of knowledge in the contentious context of global agricultural development.

Current Anthropology <Link>

Cultivating Knowledge is valuable for underlining the agency of the farmers in the increasing commodification of agriculture. This goes beyond the prevailing account of the domination of the rural by city-based technoscientific and capital-intensive interventions. Flachs meticulously shows that Telangana farmers are not passive players but rather performers on the agricultural stage. Moreover, the seemingly dominant GM and organic seed programs are not already intact and coherent outside farmwork but rather in a constant process of formation. Cultivating Knowledge is a timely, well-researched, and well-written book that appeals to readers who are interested in rural India, rural livelihoods, political economy, development, agricultural knowledge and technologies, and performance studies.

Economic Botany <Link>

This book approaches from a fundamental perspective the question: How does a farmer, as an individual choose between these two forms of cotton cultivation, especially if the farmer is free to choose in a neo-liberal market…I believe this book is plain, simple, but smartly comprehends the four years of intense research activity carried out in the field. This sort of book is specifically recommended for agricultural researchers and extension workers so that they can reframe their concept about farmers and agriculture in this modern world.

H-NET <Link>

Flachs has done a fine job in portraying the anxiety and complications of farmers making momentous choices in an exceptionally difficult environment of unpredictable pests, uncontrollable climate change, and fickle markets that can make or destroy a farmer. He concludes that Bt cotton is neither suicide seed nor silver bullet. Whatever its faults as market commodity, genuine Bt cotton seeds reduce chemical pesticide use and do not drive suicides. There are no silver bullets, in genes or organic alternatives.

Human Ecology <Link>

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…Cultivating Knowledge is a call for a nuanced analysis of farmer learning situated in political-economic institutions such as neoliberal cotton markets and social institutions like caste systems.

Journal of Agrarian Change <Link>

Cultivating Knowledge offers an exceptionally well‐researched, well‐written and insightful contribution based on ambitious and impressive mixed methods involving participant observation, in‐depth interviews, seed surveys, GIS modelling and more, carried out over several successive seasons in several villages…Cultivating Knowledge is a book of rare insight, written in such lively prose and offering such exquisite and original empirical analyses of farming practices that it will become a key reference point for scholars of rural issues, biotechnology and agricultural development in India and elsewhere.

Journal of Peasant Studies <Link>

Andrew Flachs’ Cultivating Knowledge is a compelling and wonderfully written ethnography on the failures of neoliberalism and the difficult choices faced by cotton farmers in the Telangana district of India, a region known for its quick adoption of GM cotton. The book is all the more relevant today as background context for understanding the stakes of the historic farmer protests that erupted in India in late 2020. Based on years of research in Telangana state, including participant observation, geographic information system (GIS) data collection, and interviews with some 500 farmers, Cultivating Knowledge carefully compares the seed choices and learning of Bt and organic cotton farmers in the region. In the process, the book offers helpful insight into the question of how to evaluate rural well-being; a particularly important question in India where agriculture remains a key livelihood for the majority of people and farmer distress, debt and suicide, particularly among the most marginalized, are issues of great concern.

Journal of Political Ecology <Link>

Set in the context of the introduction of genetically modified (GM) cotton seeds in India in 2002 by the multinational Monsanto, and the almost synchronous launch of organic farming programs that by definition have to be non-GM, Flachs' is a brilliant, nuanced, well-researched and theoretically informed account of how farmers learn about new seeds and how farmers make planting decisions...In telling the story of GM and organic seeds in India, Flachs presents a beautiful mix of anthropology and political ecology. He takes a dialectical approach. There are no heroes or villains. Each turns into the other sooner or later.

Rural Sociology <Link>

This book should find a place on the shelf of any rural sociologist. It is written in an engaging style, and Flachs’s theoretical points are livened up with insightful quotes from farmers and vignettes of their lives. His prose is clear and concise despite addressing complex theories from anthropology, cultural studies, and agrarian studies, which should encourage the use of excerpts from this book in undergraduate rural sociology courses. Flachs’s methodological discussions alone would provide a worthy example for students to learn from, such as how the selection of research methods should be guided by the questions pursued and how budding ethnographic investigators can gain access to skeptical participant communities.

Society for the Anthropology of Work Review <Link>

Flachs’ research findings highlight the complexity of global commodity networks as well as farmers’ personal ideologies of work, well-being, and success. At the same time, the book makes an applied contribution by addressing comparative questions that anthropologists are often hesitant to approach, at the risk of offering imperfect solutions. In this light, Cultivating Cotton is a must-read for those researching agricultural development projects or small-scale independent farming. Moreover, the book would be an excellent addition to a course on political ecology, the anthropology of work, or agricultural labor more generally. It provides a useful case study of the ways that systems of neoliberal capitalism reproduce themselves via nebulous global market demands that create unending cycles of risk and debt.

Press for Cultivating Knowledge

New Books Network Podcast <NBN>

What problems does organic cotton solve? <Sapiens>

Farmer protests and cotton capitalism <A Public Affair>

Farmers living and dying by cotton seeds in India <Edge Effects>

Bt cotton: Cultivating farmer distress in India <OffGuardian>

Technological “fixes” aren’t making us happier <Salon>

How India’s changing cotton sector has led to distress, illnesses, failure <Purdue University Newsroom, Phys.org>

For India’s cotton farmers, cooperatives — not technology — offer stability <Salon>

Cotton Complexities in South India <Forage! Blog of the Society of Ethnobiology>

Field Notes: Andrew Flachs Shares Insight from India <University of Arizona Press>