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.
Scott's notion of “seeing like a state” in schemes legitimated by aims of “improving the human condition” resonates with contemporary state efforts to manage the cutting edge of biological science for those same ends.Footnote 1 The genomics revolution in biology during the late twentieth century spawned genuinely novel societal questions of both political and moral economy, generating antagonistic politics around agriculture on a global scale. How should or could novel organisms created by recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology be governed? At what scale? Enforcing what rights and responsibilities? Scott's insights around state visions and power suggest an approach that is superior to the desiccated technocratic or hyperbolic partisan perspectives that currently dominate this global rift.
The dominant response to novel challenges of the genomics revolution was, in Scott's terms, “high modernist”: a global panopticon of linked state structures to classify, register, and control products of genetic engineering in crops. New biosafety and bioproperty regulations were premised on seeing as if there were a state with presumptive capability to see into, and regulate, novel plants from farmers’ fields to global trade. Given the spectacular complexity of living things, “seeing like a state” necessitated an especially radical “simplification” to provide “legibility.” Scott notes that “[l]egibility is a condition of manipulation. Any substantial state intervention in society—to vaccinate a population, produce goods, mobilize labor, tax people and their property. . . . requires the invention of units that are visible.”Footnote 2 Legibility is inherently problematic in living cells. Moreover, germplasm recognizes no administrative boundaries, fences, or walls. What can be seen by state operatives at the center often proves unmanageable in the periphery, as the local state closest to cropped fields is everywhere embedded in local society. The necessary “simplification” that Scott's logic posits collapsed all differences in rDNA plants to a unitary object of governance: the genetically modified organism, or GMO. This reductionist condensation provoked a global rift, ferociously contested by rival transnational networks espousing promotion or proscription of GMOs; each network claimed legitimation in terms of improving the human condition.Footnote 3
State simplifications in practice were dominated by a heavy thumb on the conceptual scales exerted by urban bias. Only in agriculture were rDNA products coded as GMOs. Pharmaceuticals produced by precisely the same rDNA processes (insulin, for example) were normalized, and thus exempt from the stigmata attached to all transgenic crop plants. Only the high-modernist state logic of Scott's framing could cast so radical a simplification, yet one so revealing of prevailing power and interests. In the framing of plant biotechnology, variation of fundamental importance to farmers was submerged, erased: what trait, in what cultivar, at what cost, in what ecology, with what field results? Crop biology, like the biology of Scott's German forests,Footnote 4 was flattened to a single, supposedly legible concept susceptible to organized commerce and regulation.
State visualization of biotech pharmaceuticals, in contrast, involved elaborate splitting rather than lumping. Drugs were finely differentiated by purpose, risks, and benefits. Despite dire and byzantine warnings on pill labels, urban populations appreciated advances in rDNA pharmacology and trusted their doctors; acceptable risk was the operative principle. Urban populations, on the other hand, got no tangible benefit whatsoever from most rDNA plants, which could be cast as both unnatural and destructive to a globally imagined peasantry and their rural environment. A metropolitan imaginary of the moral economy of the peasant proved remarkably resistant to evidence and blocked crop biotechnology in many countries.Footnote 5 Posters protesting “FrankenFoods” cautioned “GMOs Kill,” but there were no FrankenPills on posters. Suddenly, there were “Genes in the Food!”Footnote 6
Contrary to metropolitan GMO discourses of undifferentiated, unacceptable risk and dominance, farmers often found specific traits (such as insect resistance) in some new cultivars useful, but the accompanying regulations and prices burdensome. Not surprisingly, illicitly produced and traded genetically modified seeds began to circulate below the radar of states and firms, evading surveillance and control—often unnoticed, sometimes tolerated—on every continent.Footnote 7 The survival of this economy of stealth seeds is often dependent on Scott's nonconfrontational “weapons of the weak”—necessitated by power asymmetries—and subtle arts of resistance offstage.Footnote 8
Stealth Seeds and Stealthy Peasants: China and India
In the standard narrative of cosmopolitan transnational action networks, the GMO threatens the peasant (seldom the farmer). When confronted with evidence of widespread and rapid adoption of transgenic seeds, many “offstage” and illegal—for example, bollworm-resistant cotton in India and China, herbicide-tolerant soy in Argentina and Brazil—the narrative answered either false consciousness or power. Peasants were either tricked by corporate propaganda or somehow compelled to adopt ruinously expensive seeds.Footnote 9 There is no space in that narrative for Scott's counterhegemonic world of consciousness and praxis, adaptation and responsiveness, or arts of resistance.Footnote 10 The official record from state reporting necessarily represented a data-built façade, submerging and rendering invisible the cultivation of unapproved seeds. No one knows how many illicit transgenic seeds are in the ground, just as precise numbers of pervasive illegal activities globally are concealed.Footnote 11 States have interests in their narratives and perceptions of their power: they claim control of rDNA plants in compliance with international soft law, reassuring urban consumers of biosafety and transnational firms of bioproperty.
China and India, the former with a more authoritarian state, the latter more democratic, are illustrative. Cotton cultivars containing a single gene from a soil bacterium toxic to insects was the first biotech project of developmental states in both countries, in the early 1990s. These cottons manufactured in their own cells an insecticidal protein lethal to bollworms, named Bt, from the common soil bacterium that donated the gene (Bacillus thuringiensis). China's public-sector efforts succeeded; India's failed, leaving the field open to private firms. Bt cotton became dominant in both countries, with similar results: the insecticidal protein reduces synthetic pesticide spraying for bollworms, improving farmer returns, farmer health, and the environment.Footnote 12
States have urgent legitimation interests in proclaimed schemes, but typically fail in achieving the necessary cohesion and control. Chinese ministries took conflicting positions on biotechnology. Public scientific institutions promoted biotechnology, and those with environmental mandates took a precautionary line, whereas agriculture-allied sections promoted biotech vigorously. Predictably, monitoring and control of farmers’ experimental and gray-market seeds in villages proved virtually impossible. Despite an intrusive and muscular state, Chinese farmers may well have invented the modern stealth seed—an unapproved transgenic virus-resistant tobacco—in 1988. Illegal Bt rice has been grown, sold, and exported to countries in Asia and Europe since at least 2005. Regulation was a game of cat and mouse, the state periodically cracking down while simultaneously announcing ambitious new biotechnology projects—for example, to deploy transgenic maize and soy varieties by 2020.Footnote 13 State-sponsored development of biotechnology continues, augmented by purchase of Syngenta—the world's third-largest seed producer—but the government treads cautiously around popular fears of GMOs, especially in cities, where promotional propaganda campaigns are launched by the state. The cat energetically assures mass publics of its effective pursuit of mice; the mouse knows that skinny local cats can be placated or evaded.
India likewise sponsored public-sector development of biotechnology, but its strong-weak developmental state failed to develop genetically engineered cultivars useful to farmers. Investment by private firms was deterred by daunting regulatory requirements and fierce political opposition. Monsanto was cast in its familiar role as villain of the piece. But three years before Monsanto—as a junior partner with the indigenous Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company (Mahyco)—obtained Delhi's approval to sell three Bt cotton hybrids, a small Gujarati firm, Navbharat Seeds, was multiplying and selling transgenic seeds registered with the State of Gujarat as a bollworm-resistant hybrid, Navbharat 151. It contained the same Cry1Ac Bt gene as Mahyco-Monsanto's trial versions, but in different germplasm. Navbharat's hybrid was not, however, approved by the peak regulatory body in New Delhi as a legal GMO. Agriculture is a state subject in the Constitution, argued Navbharat: there was no need to ask Delhi's permission to sell seeds.Footnote 14
Neither Delhi's panopticon nor activist networks detected these seeds until the bollworm disaster of 2001 exposed them: conventional cotton hybrids were destroyed, whereas Bt crops survived. Once discovered and revealed to be “GMOs,” Delhi charged Navbharat chief D. B. Desai with biosafety violations and seized his passport; the firm's cotton operations were shut down. NGOs demanded sterilization of the soil. Navbharat's indigenous Bt cotton was thus proscribed; Mahyco-Monsanto's Bt seeds were approved some months later and established an early lead in the market.Footnote 15 It was not property that crushed Navbharat 151, as no patent was available on plants in India, but the state's functional equivalent of property: regulation.
The crackdown on Navbharat backfired; illegal Bt variants were forced underground. On the farm, officially approved “government seeds” seemed unreasonably expensive and came in only three versions for the entire country. With Navbharat 151 banned, a cottage industry of Bt cultivars appeared. Bt seeds grown in Andhra Pradesh were shipped to Gujarat across two state lines under the guise of being destined for oil pressing, not planting. Some farmers took a chance on very cheap seeds straight from the gin, hoping—with some success—to get sufficient Bt protection. A train locally dubbed the Bt Express exported seeds from Gujarat across India (and Pakistan) and brought in farmers to obtain illicit seeds. Demand for underground seeds was driven by low prices and solid performance; some were guaranteed locally by shopkeepers.
Contrary to the drearily alien names of Mahyco-Monsanto seeds—such as MECH 185—the illegal seeds conveyed terrific cultural resonance: Luxmi (wealth), Agni (fire), Rukshuk (protection), Kavach (amulet). Some nomenclature took a riskier position around the “hidden transcripts” that Scott emphasizes, paying indirect homage to the banned Navbharat 151—for example, Captain 151—or deployed thinly veiled camouflage, as in BesT Cotton Seed. Some seeds were sold in cloth bags with generic indicators: Kurnool Bt for district of origin, for example. Some came in packets resonating with an earlier state-sanctioned moral economy: they quoted verbatim the pre-GMO Indian Seed Act of 1966 establishing farmers’ rights to save and share seeds. Many illicit seeds were well bred and successful, but there was also exploitation of farmers by counterfeits exhibiting little or irregular or no expression of the insecticidal Bt protein. This is one origin of the “Bt cotton has failed” meme that became a pervasive urban myth.Footnote 16
Delhi's seed crackdown stimulated anonymous underground resistance off stage, but also some onstage collective action above ground. Farmers rallied at Nilkantheshwar Temple on the sacred Narmada River in 2001, outraged by the banning of Navbharat 151. They demanded indigenous Bt seeds. Sharad Joshi, president of Shetkari Sanghathana, then the largest farmers organization in India, spoke at a huge rally where farmers pledged to protect the new cotton: “Over our dead bodies . . . They will have to walk over our corpses to destroy this crop. This is our satyagraha.” Uneven development was challenged: “This is a question of the farmer's freedom to select his seed and access technology . . . Development should not be locked up in the cities. The marvel of technology should reach the villages.”Footnote 17
The local moral economy celebrated choice, self-determination, and sectoral justice, explicitly rejecting both urban bias and monopoly pricing enabled by state regulation. Resistance deployed cultural tropes drawn from a distinctly Indic symbol pool. The site was the sacred Narmada, the protest a satyagraha. The temple is that of the “blue-throat” Shiva who swallowed poison to protect humanity, just as Bt crops, some claimed, saved rural people from sprayed pesticides that were poisoning them and their soil—and bankrupting farmers.
The government of Gujarat—then led by Chief Minister Narendra Modi—rejected Delhi's demand to destroy the crop and forced an embarrassing retreat. Emboldened, neighboring Maharashtra State soon approved Bt cotton against Delhi's prohibition. Its State Assembly argued that their farmers compete with Gujarati farmers who have Bt cotton; they demand to have it. Delhi dithered some months until a pop-up farmers organization—the Kisan Coordinating Committee—threatened a national strike pending immediate authorization of Bt cotton. Three days later, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee in Delhi granted approval, leading to the rapid adoption of the technology.Footnote 18 Underground spread of illegal Bt hybrids continued in parallel offstage, however, mainly because of price. The cost of official seeds remained high until farmer protests pushed states to dramatically lower the prices of all Bt cotton seeds in 2006. The cost advantage of stealth seeds waned—until technology advanced and new stealth hybrids emerged with a stacked gene formulation to deter bollworm resistance to Cry1Ac; even newer underground seeds, still illegal, added transgenic herbicide tolerance to the stacked Bt genes. More than a thousand Bt hybrids have been officially approved in India; these covered about 95 percent of cotton land because seeds are a divisible technology and worked regardless of farm size.Footnote 19
Potatoes Still in the Sack? “GM Satyagraha”
When farmers prove incapable of onstage collective action, does a furtive network of underground seeds beyond state surveillance suffice? It is impossible to analyze conditions for the success or even extent of stealthy behavior: we are ourselves blind, and often surprised by new evidence. For example, though Bt brinjal (eggplant or aubergine) was rejected by India's environment minister in 2010 after nine years of testing and approval by the designated science panel, Bt seeds from neighboring Bangladesh predictably returned by stealth to India.Footnote 20 Ironically, these seeds came from plants in Bangladesh grown with a donated gene constructed in India (Event EE1). Illegal herbicide-tolerant cotton, with two stacked Bt genes, is widely planted.Footnote 21 Virus-resistant papaya, developed for Hawaii and widely grown illegally in Thailand, is available in Indian seed markets, along with unauthorized maize and soy seeds. In China, illegal Bt rice, corn, rapeseed, soybeans, sunflowers, and potatoes are grown. Accurate mapping is essentially impossible. With no reliable official panopticon, and state interests in dissimulation, Greenpeace has taken up monitoring and publicizing illicit GMOs. Much unauthorized biotechnology would otherwise remain unknown; but accuracy remains questionable, since Greenpeace has interests of its own in the numbers.
Scott's methodological point is helpful here: the state claims more interest and power in rural affairs than is the case. In all of the foregoing instances, niches for resistance waxed and waned in the interstices of state power “when the intrusions of the state into village affairs were only sporadic.”Footnote 22 Global pressures and urban discontent after the liberalization of information pressed China into sporadic attention to otherwise unimportant issues of statecraft: a few invisible genes here or there. Yet even sporadic incursions can be costly at the bottom. Facing irregular prosecution, Indian farmers have revived the tactical wisdom of remembered resistance to resuscitate the satyagraha of 2001. In one instance of sporadic crackdown on illegal seeds in Maharashtra in 2019, “the police were suddenly reacting to a phenomenon that many farmers claim has always been ‘open and widespread’ but hadn't been addressed as a challenge to the state before.”Footnote 23 “Open and widespread” describes a resistance rooted in long-standing rural moral economy embedded in local society but usually unimportant to the state; the arrests remind us of the risks of romanticizing small victories.
Argentine exceptionalism presents a countercase to the powerlessness of potatoes in a sack. Farmers’ power relative to those in other societies in the Southern Cone of Latin America allowed Argentina to refuse Monsanto's demands for patents on herbicide-tolerant (Roundup Ready) soy seeds in 1998. This opened paths for farmers to breed, plant, and export gray-market “brown bag” transgenic seeds to Paraguay, Uruguay, and, most dramatically, Brazil, where President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva conceded to the demands of farmers in Rio Grande do Sul to continue sowing seeds from underground channels. He admitted the political impossibility of doing otherwise: how can you take seeds away from farmers?Footnote 24 The source of illegal GMOs was clear; some Brazilian farmers referred to “Maradona seeds”: elusive, productive, and born in Argentina.
Stealth seeds thus episodically illustrate instances of what Scott called “the typical, ‘garden variety’ resistance that characterizes much of the peasantry” historically, in new circumstances.Footnote 25 Such resistance in the case of stealth seeds is, however, dependent on states—China, India, Argentina—that open avenues of technical change in agriculture and allow tactical retreat from unwinnable confrontation.
Coda: Moral Economy and Method
State schemes of simplification and control of biotech seeds were hard on farmers. States had interests in setting biosafety regulations to reassure mass publics symbolically; they typically set the biosafety bar too high for small firms like Navbharat yet compatible with the vast expertise, personnel, and deep pockets of multinationals. The resulting bioproperty regimes—however unenforceable field by field—encouraged monopoly, restricted access, depressed innovation, enabled counterfeit fraud and generated risk of prosecution for both firms and farmers. State claims of bioproperty—however little patents meant on the ground—fed transnational advocacy networks seeking to block seeds that many farmers found useful in hardscrabble struggles with nature. Today, even as the prospects for struggling farms look worse and worse, the genetic possibility frontier is expanding rapidly.Footnote 26 New technologies of gene editing promise far greater utility—and uncertainty—than transgenic plants, with faster breeding at lower cost and wider ambit, more democratic and distributed, and thus even less susceptible to state surveillance and control in any public interest. The inventor of the dominant editing technique (CRISPR)—2020 Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna—calls it “scar-less surgery.”Footnote 27 There is nothing for a state to see.
What is to be done? Scott's emphasis on the perils of states’ instrumental vision of the rural world underscores a caution for social scientists. Data are always and everywhere stubbornly social products, their relation to ground reality dependent on the interests of their producers and conditions of production. Mobilization of disinformation reciprocally disrupts Scott's already myopic state, limiting political capacity to see anything clearly. Foreshadowed are more treacherous tribal contestations over the facts indispensable for “improving the human condition.” Is climate change a hoax? Almost unimaginable threats make a state that can see, plan, and act seem more urgent than ominous. The social scientist is then obligated to get it right through methods that respect the less legible aspects of life at the bottom, beyond easy and instrumental representations. James Scott provided a model and method for our tribe.
