Global Ethnography and Genetically Modified Crops in Argentina

GM Crops, Global Processes, and Global Ethnography

The role of GM crops in agriculture is a hotly debated issue, and researchers usually present contrasting and opposing views. While some scholars have argued that GM crops hold enormous potential for underdeveloped countries (e.g., Cohen and Paarlberg 2004; Cooper, Lipper, and Zilberman 2005; Herring 2007; Tripp 2009; cf. Glover 2010), critics emphasize the negative socioeconomic impacts of GM crops. Critical perspectives analyzing GM crops in the context of global capitalism understand them as expression of the current food regime, that is, as stemming from relations of production and consumption of feed, fiber, and food spanning the world. Whether emphasizing the role of transnational companies leading a “corporate food regime” (McMichael 2009) or focusing on the articulation between global corporations and national states in the creation of a “neoliberal food regime” (Otero 2012), food regime scholars see GM crops as derivatives of global agrarian capitalism. This framework is useful when putting cases in a broader context; yet their “structural bias” usually does not fit well with an ethnographic approach. To put it as a metaphor, food regime scholars offer a world map but this cartography is usually of little help in capturing micro-level, situated interactions and, overall, tends to gloss over actors’ own understandings of GM crops. In summary, I argue that available global approaches to GM crops present three limitations, which a global ethnography perspective may address: first, the articulation of multiple scales, ranging from global to local; second, the variation within subordinate actors; and third, some of the environmental problems brought about by agricultural biotechnology.

First, an ethnographic approach attentive to both global forces and its concrete manifestations is better equipped to capture the articulation between global, national, and local scales, and therefore avoid a tendency to see global processes in evolutionary or monolithic terms. When analyzing GM crops, attention to their localized and tangible effects can help us to avoid broad generalizations about global capitalism, as well as keep us from overlooking its spatial manifestations and uneven geographies (Le Heron and Roche 1995; Le Heron 2009; Woods 2007). As scholars developing global ethnography argue, “ethnography’s concern with concrete, lived experience can sharpen the abstractions of globalization theories into more precise and meaningful conceptual tools” (Gowan and Ó Riain 2000, xiv). Building on the approach developed by global ethnographers allows us to go beyond schematic conceptualizations of “the local” as the place that “the global” impacts and to rather see the interconnections and frictions between global, national, and local scales. Approaching global processes taking these precautions circumvents the persistent identification of the global with the universal and the local with the particular, a conflation that confuses the level of analysis with the geographical scale (Massey 1994).

An ethnographic approach to global processes does not miss the effects of power and inequalities involved in capitalist relationships but stresses that we need not see global capitalism in evolutionary terms. Even when analyzed at a global scale, capitalism is not a monolithic force; we must resist the fallacy of globalism, that is, representing the world as evolving through unilinear trends. Ethnographers conceptualizing global processes therefore take issue with interpretations of capitalism as dynamics that emanate from economically advanced centers imposing an external force on peripheries, and having monolithic effects across spaces (Tsing 2005). As anthropologist Anna Tsing put it (2005, 3), if globalization “can be predicted in advance there is nothing to learn from research except how the details support the plan. And if world centers provide the dynamic impetus for global change, why even study more peripheral places?” As Michael Burawoy points out (2000a), we always need to identify how global processes are locally mediated and how they create diverse effects on everyday life. The idea that a global picture can be developed by macrostructural views and then “filled in” by ethnographic portraits of “the local” fails to understand that “the global-local antinomy is itself misleading, for if something is global there can be nothing outside that is local” (Burawoy 2001, 156–57). An ethnographic gaze may thus avoid the perils of assuming “that one can characterize changes of the whole without examining changes of the parts or, to put it the other way round, that the secret of the part can be found in the whole” (Burawoy 2000b, 343). This tendency can be avoided through a research design “in which the global is collapsed into and made an integral part of parallel, related local situations rather than something monolithic or external to them” (Marcus 1995, 102). In summary, an ethnographic approach provides access to a grounded globalization (Gille and Ó Riain 2002), offering a counterweight to theories seeing global processes as uniformly shaped by neoliberal globalization, while providing tools to analyze the multiple scales involved in both the adoption, diffusion, and adaptions to GM crops.

Second, approaching GM crops with a global ethnographic lens attentive to multiple scales can contribute to a better understanding of the connections between GM crops, global processes, and dynamics of mobilization and demobilization. Research on these connections have overwhelmingly focused on the resistance to transgenic agriculture, oftentimes failing to capture the variation within subordinated groups, and the ways in which they resist but also accommodate global forces. A multiscalar approach is key to conceptualizing processes of resistance and accommodation to GM crops, the transnational dimensions of struggles, and/or lack thereof. Transnational issues like the opposition to GM crops pose challenges when we try to link global advocacy and local problems, especially when spokespersons may “be seen as often very detached from rural realities and agrarian struggles” (Scoones 2008, 326–27). Social movement leaders need to juggle participation in international forums while maintaining involvement with their grassroots organizations (Desmarais 2007, 158–60). I approached these transnational issues and struggles from an ethnographic perspective, paying attention to the points of view of leaders but also of rural inhabitants.

My ethnographic analysis focuses on effects of GM crop expansion that have so far received little attention, namely, the analysis of both the resistance and accommodation to GM crops among subordinated groups. As I illustrate in the empirical section, the reactions of peasants in northern Argentina to the socioenvironmental consequences of GM crops varied from contention to adaptation. An extensive body of research has investigated the resistance to agricultural biotechnology among farmers (e.g., Buttel 2003; Klepek 2012; Fitting 2011; Peschard 2012; Shiva 2000; Tokar 2001), consumers (Guthman 2003; Ho, Vermeer, and Zhao 2006; Schurman and Kelso 2003; Schurman and Munro 2010; Roff 2007), and coalitions (Bridge, McManus, and Mardsen 2003; Eaton 2009; Fitting 2011; Müller 2006; Pearson 2012; Scoones 2008; Wainwright and Mercer 2009). In contrast, we know much less about situations in which rural populations both resist but also adapt to the consequences of GM crop production. Several scholars have advanced our knowledge on the role of social movements against GM crops in Latin America (Bravo 2010; Fitting 2011; Klepek 2012; Newell 2008; Otero 2008; Pearson 2012; Scoones 2008), but the lack of collective action despite visible negative consequences of the expansion of GM soybeans is still an underexplored area of research. ⁵ The expansion of GM crops in Argentina thus offers a counterpoint to probe issues of resistance, adaptation, and hegemony (Newell 2009).

Third, analyzing GM crops through global ethnography can shed light on socio-environmental issues that have barely been explored. Scholars have contributed to our understanding of the socio-environmental consequences of agricultural biotechnology, such as the de-skilling of smallholders after the adoption of GM cotton (Stone 2007) or the variations in pesticide use (Stone 2011). Environmental assessments of GM crops present different positions, from cautiously favorable (National Research Council 2004) to posing questions about potential environmental risks (Cerdeira and Duke 2006; Snow et al. 2005; Wolfenbarger and Phifer 2000). Agro-ecological perspectives on GM crops have been a vocal voice in the debate, emphasizing their negative environmental consequences (e.g. Altieri and Rosset 1999; Rissler and Mellon 1996; for reviews, see Herdt 2006; Stone 2010). Scholars studying GM crops have investigated their connection to the commodification of seeds and the control of agriculture (Kloppenburg 2005; Kinchy 2012; Pechlaner 2012). However, researchers have paid much less attention to the role of GM crops in revitalizing an old problem of agricultural production, namely, contamination due to agrochemical drifts (Harrison 2011; Wright 2005).

Methods and Data Collection

I conducted fieldwork in Fontana, a province of northern Argentina, in two strongholds of MoCaFon (the Peasant Movement of Fontana): the rural community of Monte Azul and the nearby town of Curuzú, and the semirural town of Moreno. After making initial contact in 2003, I collected data between 2007 and 2011 for a total of twelve months of fieldwork. I conducted forty-five semistructured interviews, took part in the activities held in MoCaFon offices in Curuzú and Moreno, lived in the houses of peasant families in Monte Azul, and participated in rallies and meetings. Extensive notes on interactions and dialogues were taken throughout this time. Transcribed interviews were coded and analyzed after each round of fieldwork, using open and focused coding (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995), identifying the instances when people talked about GM crops and agrochemical drifts. Provisional findings guided subsequent rounds of data collection, following an established qualitative research strategy of making preliminary interpretations and returning to the field to gather data suggested by those interpretations (Becker 1998, 151–57). In conducting my interviews, I relied on both “snowball” sampling—asking people to refer me to others for interviewing—and also by simply approaching farms and asking peasants if they were willing to talk to me. I followed the principles of theoretical sampling, seeking to build up or contrast emerging themes (Corbin and Strauss 1990; Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). In contrasting the different reactions to agrochemical drifts in 2003 and 2009, the study also followed a longitudinal case comparison structure (Walton 1992, 129–34).

Ethnographic methods allowed me to answer questions regarding demobilization and processes of adaptation to agrochemical drifts. Protest events, which involve public and collective claim-making (Tilly 2006, 49), usually leave a “paper trail” that can be traced. However, the lack of open confrontations with authorities hardly leaves public records. Thus processes of accommodation and adaptation to GM crops and agrochemical drifts were captured by the observation of practices and in-depth interviews. Furthermore, participant observation among social movements allowed me to register the practices and discourses of both leaders and constituencies, thus avoiding the pitfalls of the “elite bias” when apprehending meaning-making processes (Benford 1997, 421–22). This methodological strategy can also apprehend the cultural practices of both mobilized and demobilized constituencies (Burdick 1995) and provide “a more genuine appreciation of the lived experience of movement participants and nonparticipants” (Edelman 2001, 309). In short, an ethnographic approach offered access to interactions when people were not engaged in open contention, while giving me the advantage of reaching nonparticipants and recording interactions between leaders and members of a social movement. ⁶

Neoliberalization and the Uneven Geography of GM Crop Expansion in Argentina

Argentina has been at the forefront of both the implementation of neoliberal policies and the adoption of GM crops. In the early 1990s, the national government applied the neoliberal policies promoted by global financial institutions (i.e., the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). In the agricultural sector, these policies entailed the elimination of regulatory measures (controlling the prices and the commercialization of grains, meat, cotton, sugar, etc.), the lifting of tariffs for agricultural supplies (seeds, agrochemicals, machinery), and the promotion of export commodities (Teubal, Domínguez, and Sabatino 2005). These transformations created “elective affinities” between the sweeping liberalization of markets and the adoption of GM crops. In 1996, the national Secretary of Agriculture quickly granted the approval of GM soybeans developed by Monsanto Co., engineered to resist the company’s herbicide Roundup Ready.

These changes aligned Argentina with the “neoliberal food regime” (Otero 2012; Teubal 2008), engaging corporations but also farmers, public officials, journalists, and mass media. GM soybean production rapidly expanded in the Pampas, the region of fertile lowlands historically characterized by its export-oriented agriculture. Medium to large farms, “sowing pools,” and mega-agricultural firms led this expansion (Gras and Hernández 2009), in a context that favored agribusiness and transforming GM soybeans in Argentina’s “star crop.” Public officials in charge of agricultural matters eagerly supported GM crops, seeing them as the latest advancement in agriculture that offered Argentina an economic opportunity that could not be missed. Mass media conglomerates actively promoted agricultural biotechnology among farmers: The two main Argentine newspapers, Clarín and La Nación, are staunch supporters of GM crops and actively fostered the creation of “common sense” promoting their unrestricted adoption and production (see Lapegna 2007; Newell 2009).

By the mid-2000s, the area of GM soybean had soared, covering nearly 50 percent of the arable land, more than 18 million hectares (almost 44.5 million acres). In 1997–1998, Argentina produced 18.7 million tons of soybeans; by 2006–2007, production rose to 47.5 million tons, reaching almost 53 million tons in 2010 (SAGPyA 2007; INDEC 2012). In 2010, the exports of the soybean agro-industrial complex (soybeans, oil, and flour) accrued to one-fourth of the total exports from Argentina and were worth more than 17.3 billion dollars (MAGyP 2011). Virtually all soybeans produced in Argentina are genetically modified. A USDA report aptly summarizes this process stating: “No other Latin American country embraced GM Crops as wholeheartedly as Argentina” (Yankelevich 2006, 3).

GM soybean production in the Pampas region reached its limit in terms of land availability by the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, and began to expand to other regions of Argentina (Pengue 2005). With land prices in the Pampas increasing up to 50 percent (INTA 2004), farmers and investors bought and/or rented cheaper land in the northwest and northeast regions of the country, deforesting woods and advancing into areas occupied by peasant families and indigenous communities. Soybean production mushroomed in every province in a “Soy Rush” of sorts, with cultivation reaching road shoulders and plants being sowed on the outskirts of rural and semirural towns. NGOs, journalists, and social movements report a number of cases in which agrochemicals drifted from agricultural plots to people’s houses and/or to farms, destroying smallholders’ crops and affecting the health of local inhabitants (GRR 2009; Domínguez and Sabatino 2010; Leguizamón, forthcoming).

In short, the adoption of GM crops in Argentina was a process fostered by global corporations with the active and convinced support of national and local actors (namely, Argentine agribusiness, the state at its different levels, and journalists). In expanding from the Pampas to the Argentine North, GM soybeans contributed to delineating uneven geographies. Whereas in the Pampas many medium to large farmers and agribusiness companies benefited from GM crop production, their expansion to northern provinces show that when making terrain, GM crop production connects marginal areas to circuits of global production while treating rural populations and peasant families as a nuisance.

Fontana is a good example of these processes. This northeast province of Argentina developed a polarized social and economic structure between the 1930s and mid-1970s as a large group of poor peasants produced cotton for a highly regulated market and grew staples for self-consumption and a small group of large landowners bred cattle on large properties. In the 1970s, peasants organized collectively in Peasant Leagues (Ligas Campesinas), which were fiercely repressed during the military dictatorship of 1976–1982 (Ferrara 1973; Rozé 1992). During the democratization initiated in 1983, peasants re-created an organization to defend their interests, but when this organization became an ally of the provincial government, a group of smallholders created MoCaFon (Movimiento Campesino de Fontana, “the Peasant Movement of Fontana”) in the late 1990s. MoCaFon became an important oppositional force in the province, organizing a series of demonstrations against structural adjustment policies. In contrast, medium and large landowners of Fontana took advantage of the business opportunities created by the economic transformations of the 1990s and switched from cattle to crop production, renting their lands to agri-businessmen from other provinces or creating joint ventures with them. Frequently, politicians (or their close relatives) are also landowners and/or shareholders of agribusiness companies. In a similar fashion to the expansion of GM cotton in India (Shah 2005), the diffusion of GM soybeans in northern Argentina was crucially shaped by the benefits its cultivation promised to local agrarian élites. In only a few years, the area cultivated with soybeans in Fontana grew from 250 hectares in 1999–2000 to 9,000 hectares in 2002–2003 (Sapkus 2002).

The socio-environmental effects of these changes were soon felt in the countryside and among peasants and small farmers. In Monte Azul, a rural community in the center of Fontana province, the “soy rush” translated into peasants’ farms being surrounded by plots rented by agribusiness entrepreneurs from other provinces to grow GM soybeans. CFA (Agricultural Fontanan Company), a joint venture created by agri-businessmen from the provinces of Salta and Jujuy, rented a total of 350 hectares (more than 860 acres) in Monte Azul subdivided into small plots neighboring the farms of peasant families. CFA hired a local agricultural engineer, Julio Cortello, to provide on-the-ground information about the best plots to rent (Cortello was an employee of the provincial Ministry of Production). Under the direction of Cortello, CFA employed local youth for the preparation and use of agrochemicals. When I interviewed these workers, they explained that glyphosate (the herbicide GM soybeans endure) was frequently mixed with 2,4-D, a more toxic agrochemical. ⁷ The intense and careless use of agrochemicals soon brought negative consequences. Peasants of Monte Azul say that after soybean production started, they noticed that their tomatoes and lettuce began to wither, their cassava grew smaller roots, and the fruit trees did not flourish as they used to do. When in February 2003 a massive agrochemical drift brought sudden havoc to a group of peasant families in Monte Azul, people organized to address this problem.

“To Defend What Is Ours”: Peasants against GM Crops and Agrochemical Drifts ⁸

In February 2003, soybean growers were in a rush to get rid of unwanted weeds, prepare the soil, and plant new soybeans as soon as possible in their Monte Azul plots. CFA managers were racing against the clock to achieve three harvests instead of two during the 2002–2003 season. In spite of the hot weather and strong winds, employees received orders to mix agrochemicals and fumigate the plots using a “mosquito,” a kind of tractor with faucets on the sides. The high temperatures made the powerful agrochemicals vaporize quickly, and the wind caused them to drift towards neighboring plots. When locals woke up the next day, they found an “environmental onslaught” of their small farms. All of their cotton and staples (cassava, beans, pumpkins, lettuce, tomato, etc.) were totally withered; the plants looked “as if someone had put a flame next to them” or “as if someone had doused them with chlorine.” The cotton bolls they were expecting to harvest a month later (and sell to make enough money to make ends meet for a year) had fallen to the soil; the staples they rely on to feed their families and to sell in a local farmers market were destroyed, their leaves completely withered.

Nélida and Horacio, the local representatives of MoCaFon filed a formal complaint at the police station and convened a meeting with the more than two-dozen affected peasants. They agreed to hire an agricultural engineer, who confirmed that plants showed the typical effects of 2,4-D. He recommended destroying all of the affected plants, and suggested that the vomiting, headaches, soreness in throat and face, and skin rashes people were suffering were most likely caused by herbicides. He also told them that the rain had probably transported remnants of agrochemicals to the reservoirs where they obtained water on a daily basis. A professor of ecology from the University of Fontana confirmed these conclusions. Peasant leaders, bolstered by the reports of the two experts, wrote a petition to the Municipal Council of Curuzú requesting its intervention in the case. However, the local politicians ignored their pleas.

A few days later, a group of Monte Azul women were having a meeting at the local school and got word that the “mosquito” was coming to the area. The group went to the soybean plot and blocked the entrance “armed” with rolling pins and pieces of wood. “We gathered courage, we did something to defend what is ours, and the decision [to block the entrance of the soybean field] was made by us, the mothers; several of us, Nélida and other compañeras” said Juana, one of the affected peasants. Nélida, whose son was working for soybean growers, provides a glimpse of how people, especially women, felt about what was going on. She, like Juana, expressed her outrage as a mother:

I was enraged when we learned that they [the agrochemicals] were very poisonous, very dangerous, and these people [the managers] didn’t even tell the kids to “use gloves and be careful.” Only after everything happened, when the animals and plants had died and the kids got sick, did other people tell us they [the agrochemicals] were very poisonous. . . . They had not even told the kids “wash your hands” [after working]. And they drank water from the same place where they cleaned the tanks. The kids didn’t know about the danger either . . . when people told me “you may not notice it now but in the long term . . . they may not be able to have kids, or their sons could be deformed.” . . . I was so pissed off. . . . Because the plants and the soil may get sick and you can recover from that, but recover a son? You don’t know. If I had known, I would never have let my son do that for a miserable ten pesos [a day]. But I used to teach him to work, no matter for how much, ten, five pesos . . . and for those ten pesos, he might be sick his entire life.

When the empresarios (as people called the agri-businessmen) arrived with the machine to continue the fumigations in the soybean plot, they had a heated discussion with the group of women. Outnumbered by the group of resolved and adamant women, the empresarios decided to leave the area.

When the authorities failed to respond to peasants’ claims, MoCaFon members decided to block the highway at the entrance of Monte Azul. The road blockade lasted for several days, reaching radios and TV networks and bringing attention to the problems created by the agrochemical drift. Some days after the road blockade, a group of provincial public officials and medical doctors arrived at Monte Azul and took blood samples from local inhabitants, water samples from reservoirs, and vegetables to be tested. Soon afterwards, representatives from the provincial Ministry of Human Development offered a press conference and claimed that peasants’ health problems were due to contact with dirt and the use of winter clothes during summertime. They recommended that peasants treat these ailments by washing themselves with water and lye soap, and by taking antiparasitic pills to cure diarrhea. In each and every interview I conducted with peasants, the claims of the Ministry of Human Development were keenly remembered. As Juana said in an interview:

Those from Human Development, who should have come to see what was really going on with the people, they called us dirty. . . . I remember we started itching, we had pimples, and they say it was because of dirtiness. They say it’s because we didn’t know how to dress; that we used winter clothes during summer and summer clothes in winter. . . . They treated us badly. And that puts you down, besides all the loss, that someone is telling you that you don’t know how to dress yourself, that you don’t know how to take a bath, that you don’t know how to be tidy. . . . It’s like they were crushing us, worse than we had been before.

And what did you feel when you were told that?

I wanted to hit them in the mouth. Because I think that an educated person, supposedly more intelligent than us, should learn how to respect people, no matter how dirty we may be. But they treated us like we were dirty. . . . They said the kids had pimples because they didn’t wash with soap. . . . And they thought, “We’ll tell them anything, so they just go away.” That was the feeling I had. That they were telling us, “Go away, stay at home and if you have to die, die.” That’s mistreatment, I think.

Provincial authorities, agri-businessmen, and Fontanan landowners further denied the contamination. On March 1, a month after the fumigation, the Minister of Production held a press conference along with the president of the provincial association of agricultural engineers and asserted that

the accident [the agrochemical drift] . . . was used to misinform and create concern in the community, but the products [the agrochemicals] passed strict controls and do not affect human health, neither animals nor the soil, as some want us to believe. . . . These products are innocuous. . . . There are people interested in creating discord and confrontation that does not benefit society or the agrarian sector, but instead terribly damages the province’s image.

Similarly, CFA issued a public statement attributing the protests to “unscrupulous politicos” and admonished those linking their production with contamination “to refuse to make such accusations, because we retain the right to sue for the felony of libel and slander and for civil damages.” The representative of a landowners’ association qualified the actions of the peasants as “dangerous,” and said the protests “put us in a very hard situation, as producers and as a province.” Along similar lines, the President of the Rural Society of Fontana (a powerful and traditional organization of landowners) declared that the protests were “adding an element of disintegration,” showing an “utmost ignorance on the matter” that “do not seek to solve any problem but rather to bring chaos and confusion.”

Peasants organized another road blockade in late March, three weeks after the first. Their goal was to address their “material” grievances while also demanding recognition: They needed a solution for their economic losses and health problems, but also wanted to make clear that the contamination they were suffering was real. The new blockade exposed the institutional power wielded by agri-businessmen. CFA managers showed up in the road with more than sixty policemen, but when peasant families refused to let the fumigating machine in, soybean growers withdrew from the scene—according to their lawyer to avoid a situation of open violence.

Representatives of CFA and the provincial government unsuccessfully tried to make individual deals; they were met with the opposition of several women outraged by the public denial of the contamination. The Minister of Production, acting on behalf of soy growers, made a last attempt at quelling the discontent. In a tense meeting in Monte Azul, the Minister, “rather than acting like a public servant in charge of taking care of inhabitants’ security regarding the use of agrochemicals . . . acted like the manager of the company causing the damages,” according to the peasants’ attorney in the lawsuit. Peasants remained firmly opposed to the low compensations offered and put off by the contempt with which they were made. In August, agri-businessmen harvested the soybeans, left Monte Azul, and did not return. In early 2004, the peasants’ lawyer presented a demand for damages against CFA and the Ministry of Production. The case has been sitting in courts for years, with no agreement in sight.

“They Are Killing Us with a Wooden Knife”: Accommodating GM Crops and Agrochemical Exposure

In February 2009, six years after the contentious events of 2003, peasant families of Monte Azul felt a sense of dejá-vu. Nélida said she felt “a burning” in her neck, had blisters on her skin, and her lips felt dry and sore; a neighbor got blisters all over her back. Hundreds of chickens, which peasants let roam freely, were suddenly dead. The people of Monte Azul took their children to the hospital to cure the sudden eruption of pimples on the kids’ skin and were told that they had scabies. However, unlike in 2003, the peasants did not organize any collective actions or demonstrations to demand a solution for the losses on their farms and their health problems.

I argue that this process of demobilization can be best understood by paying attention to three factors: first, the decoupling between the scales involved in the resistance to GM crops, that is, the lack of sync between global, national, and local discourses and understandings; second, the variation within subordinated actors (i.e., peasant families), and the processes whereby they accommodated GM crops; and third, the feelings and emotions elicited by the continuation of agrochemical exposures, specifically the environmental suffering experienced by the women leading the protests of 2003.

First, a close reading of social movement leaders’ and lay peasants’ views on GM crops reveals that whereas soybean growers successfully articulated global, national, and local scales, the local social movement had trouble synchronizing the global discourses of leaders and the understandings the movement’s constituents had of the situation. When I began analyzing my ethnographic data, I noticed certain discrepancies between public discourses (deployed by leaders during moments of open confrontation) and face-to-face conversations with and among peasants. Analysis of field notes and interviews revealed that whereas local social movement leaders appropriated global environmental discourses about GM crops, seeing them as an advance of agribusiness over natural resources, MoCaFon rank-and-file and other peasants did not object to the production of GM soybeans or the use of agrochemicals per se, but were enraged when the contamination affected their crops, threatened their daily survival, or damaged their families’ health. In short, the ways in which MoCaFon leaders and rank-and-file members made sense of GM crops and agrochemical drifts were not always in sync.

The main leader of MoCaFon is a man in his early thirties, who speaks softly but firmly and rarely smiles. A skillful leader, savvy in the construction of alliances, he spends most of the year traveling to Buenos Aires and other provinces, negotiating for resources from the national state and attending meetings with other social movements. In one of my visits to Moreno, we sat down for a conversation, and he gave me his view on the problems faced by the organization: “The struggle is very hard; the agribusiness model is being imposed at any price. . . . Soybean production is the imposition of agribusiness and the appropriation of natural resources.” As the spokesperson of MoCaFon, he presented similar ideas to journalists: “We see transgenics as the invader displacing us, taking the soil from us, poisoning the environment, producing the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.” He linked GM crops to the global agricultural system: “We are against this system of concentration, genetic manipulation, this way of production, the transnationalization of companies that commercialize the supplies for agricultural production.” His articulate discourse will sound familiar to a reader acquainted with international NGOs that organize campaigns against transgenic crops. In fact, the conflict pitting Fontanan peasants and soybean growers against one another put MoCaFon leaders in contact with a series of NGOs acting in Argentina but with global connections (e.g., Greenpeace, GRAIN, REDALLT, Red por una América Latina Libre de Transgénicos) (see Newell 2008, 356).

The discourses of MoCaFon leaders and the movement’s press releases contrasted with the view of rank-and-file MoCaFon members. In everyday conversations, peasants frequently regarded transgenic crops as a menace when they threatened their daily survival, much like the peasants James Scott (1976) studied who questioned economic exploitation only when it affected resources needed for subsistence. For instance, when I asked Isaías at what moment he filed a complaint for damage to his crops, he replied that he did so “when the flowers began to fall, and the cotton bolls withered. Just then. Why should I do it before that? If they [his crops] weren’t affected, I wouldn’t make the complaint.” I asked Isaías what happened when the soy growers finished their work in Moreno:

They harvested their soy. No one interfered with their work. . . . It is said that soybeans ruin this, or that it has ruined that one, but that, at least personally, has not happened to me. If someone rents his soil, he’s the owner; he ought to know what he’s doing.

In interviews and everyday conversations, I repeatedly heard the phrase, “I reckon they [soybean growers] are working,” as if understanding that agri-businessmen have to use agrochemicals. In so doing, peasants recognized the right of soybean growers to work their lands as they please and seemed to express certain empathy for people (like them) earning their income in an uncertain activity, highly dependent on the weather, where timing (for plowing the land, sowing, and harvesting) is key to ensuring a proper yield. Other members of MoCaFon expressed similar views. For example, Nelson, a rank-and-file member of MoCaFon, clearly stated the point of not being bothered by GM crops per se by saying, “What we are asking them is to sow in the country, far from populated areas. But they sprayed the town, the farmhouses. That was the battle we had to fight . . . I don’t care if they grow soybeans, but I’m bothered when they contaminate.” People in Monte Azul were still concerned about agrochemical exposure in 2009, but their views were changing. When I visited Monte Azul and Curuzú in 2010, I attended a public talk organized by MoCaFon to raise awareness about the dangers of agrochemicals, because although the company growing soybeans in 2003 left the area other agri-businessmen rented fields and continue to produce GM soybeans. The public discourse against agrochemicals, however, contrasted with everyday conversations. As Julio, a middle-range leader of MoCaFon told me: “Glyphosate wasn’t so terrible like the 2,4-D . . . or the aztrazina was even worse! If you touched that, you burned right there. But the glyphosate . . . if you have a thousand hectares, you can’t work it with a hoe, you have to use something [an agrochemical].”

The contrast between the “official” discourses of social movement leaders and the views of the rank and file illustrates the multiscale dimension of both resistance and accommodation. Peasants’ expressions of empathy toward soybean growers show that global commodities make terrain in concrete areas by engaging the historical experiences of local populations. Fontanan peasants have constructed their identity hand in hand with the production of cotton, an activity that demands the use of often highly toxic agrochemicals. Therefore, environmental discourses criticizing the use of agrochemicals only partially resonate with their experiences. As Ian Scoones explains, the relationships between global connections and local roots surrounding GM debates and struggles is vexed (2008, 325–26). When seen through ethnographic lenses, public discourses about global processes are constrained by the localized historical experiences of people affected by them. The discourse of peasant leaders against GM crops expresses legitimate concerns and, at least in Fontana, they can hardly be seen as expressions of “metropolitan elites in low-income countries [who] adopted European framing through international networks opposing globalization” (Herring 2008, 461). Yet the lack of fit between leaders’ and constituents’ views also “raise questions about the extent to which those concerns derive from their membership base or rather from strategic and opportune positioning in relation to a current focus for mobilizations” (Newell 2008, 356).

Second, the interpretations put forward by local elites gained currency among rural inhabitants, and peasant families developed agricultural strategies to accommodate transgenics. Several peasants began to grow GM cotton because the province’s Ministry of Production gave away glyphosate-resistant seeds to small farmers. Peasants told me that they adopted GM cotton as a sort of “insurance policy,” since the variety of GM cotton promoted by the government endures glyphosate, the same herbicide used in GM soybeans and, thus, a potential agrochemical drift would not affect their plants.

In addition, obstacles for mobilization were also suggested by the views expressed by some Monte Azul peasants. In 2008, I approached smallholders from Monte Azul not affiliated with MoCaFon to hear what other peasants thought about GM crops, agrochemical exposure, and the 2003 protests. When I brought up the road blockades, they say many people “saw the opportunity and joined, expecting to get some money out if it.” One of the smallholders said that the agrochemicals are harmless, “that’s why the government approved them,” and that

If you are in your plot and you use something affecting me, I have to make my claim to you. Why should you ask the government to pay if the damage was done by someone else?

Another smallholder told me that in the protests, “everything was politics, all politics.” With two other smallholders listening to the conversation nodding beside us, he went on to say that the skin rashes attributed to agrochemical exposure were

because of a lack of hygiene. The doctors went to the community and they did the analyses, they took blood samples, and it turned out that everyone is healthy. I have a lump in my back, but I don’t pay attention to it, you have to die from something, right?

Lastly, a third aspect of demobilization processes among peasants was the realization of not only being subordinate to more powerful actors, but also of the expansion of GM crops and its related agrochemical drifts as the manifestations of being outright barred from agriculture. Agrochemical drifts had concrete consequences in the bodies of peasant families, but they were also seen as the epiphenomena of deeper exclusionary trends—as a process producing inequality as well as disrespect and denial of recognition (Fraser 2003). A sensation of mixed despair and resignation permeated small farmers living in Monte Azul regarding their future and the effects of contamination. Emilia, one of the peasants affected by agrochemicals in 2003, encapsulated people’s feelings in a telling metaphor: “They are killing us with a wooden knife; they don’t kill you at once but little by little.” Peasants were both aware of and unsettled by how agribusiness and authorities saw them. Emilia concisely expressed the combination of disrespect, disparagement, and dismissal peasants felt:

They said in the media that we were against the government, that that was the reason why were complaining. . . . And I really don’t know, but a movement, an organization, always makes its claims about rights to the government, isn’t that so? That’s why we get organized. Well, then they see us as belonging to the opposition. And it’s not true! They said we were demanding ridiculous things; that we were just making things up. Maybe they took it that way. But it wasn’t like that. It was the moment to make claims through the movement, through the organization. . . . But they surely treated us like that, as dirty, as scum, nothing.

Or, as Nélida said:

It may be that the government wants all the poor people out of here. Maybe they want to buy all the land, to get people tired, and to see everybody leave. Sooner or later, you have to do something. Because if you can’t work, if they fumigate and burn all your plants, you can’t do anything, you have to leave. Or you have to fight again to make them leave. . . . And if you don’t do anything you have to grow the same things they grow, if you want to keep living here. So they are getting us used to what they produce.

Peasants were thus keenly aware that political and economic elites view them mostly as a superfluous population. For politicians, when peasants raise a contentious voice through protests, they discourage potential investors and create political disturbances. For agribusiness, peasants living around soybean fields are nuisances in the way of a profitable activity. Granted, peasants occupied a subordinated position before the arrival of GM crops. Yet during the decades of cotton production (circa 1930s–1970s), peasants had a role—albeit a subordinated one—in the economy of the province. They were the growers of the crop that, still today, occupies a significant place in the collective imagination of Fontanans. Today, many peasants of Fontana—and Argentina at large—think and feel that agriculture has no space for them, subordinate or otherwise.

Conclusion

This article opened by contrasting the different responses of the same rural community that faced a similar environmental problem at two different points in time. In 2003, peasant families and rural inhabitants of Monte Azul reacted contentiously to an agrochemical drift whereas six years later a comparable situation was not met with collective protests. I drew from these cases to reconstruct the research on the socioenvironmental effects of GM crops, contributing to a critical and ethnographically informed perspective.

I built on the insights proposed by global ethnographers (Burawoy et al. 2000), namely, their critiques of understanding global processes as unidirectional trends of world capitalism, stemming from global centers and imposed on world peripheries. The case of Argentina shows that GM crop expansion is a project promoted by global actors (chiefly, global corporations), but that in order to be fertile it needs the support of national and local actors (public officials, farmers, and journalists). This shows how a global commodity like GM crops articulates multiple scales and creates uneven geographies. It also reveals how people suffering the negative consequences of transgenic agriculture need to articulate different scales to counteract these negative consequences, sometimes finding obstacles in doing so.

I suggested some ways in which the analytical lens of global ethnography (with its attention to both global processes and its local manifestations) can help us to address untapped transnational issues among agrarian movements. The case study in this article, inspecting a locally rooted peasant social movement, offers an example to understand “the actually existing local—national—global linkages” that “demand better and fuller understanding” (Borras, Edelman, and Kay 2008, 180). These authors also point to the “weak analytical connections between the phenomenal rise of studies in social movements and civil society on the one hand and studies on agrarian change dynamics on the other hand” (181). Here, I have provided a point of reference for future analyses of the challenges faced by rural social movements in a context of the agrarian changes ushered in by agricultural biotechnology and the neoliberal food regime.

While registering how social movement leaders drew from global imaginations and discourses about transgenic crops, I also closely examined the localized experiences and discourses of movements’ constituents revealing the limits of these global tropes. On the one hand, peasants confronted soybean growers in the public sphere, but in interviews and everyday conversations they also saw commonalities with soybean growers that, just like them, were trying to make a living via farming, and “acknowledged” that farmers needed to use agrochemicals to achieve a good harvest. On the other hand, the rank-and-file women who mobilized against agrochemical drifts used motherhood as an idiom for protest, a trope that was little—if at all—present in leaders’ discourses. In contrasting the discourses of leaders and constituents I also sought to illuminate research gaps in the literature on transnational agrarian movements, namely, issues of representation and “the internal dynamics of the agrarian movement themselves” (Borras, Edelman, and Kay 2008, 179). The close reading of the discourse of peasants who were not involved in MoCaFon also indicated “patterns in the testimony of people in the movement’s targeted group who are sympathetic to movement objectives but who feel alienated or marginalised by one or another aspect of movement discourse or practice” (Edelman 2009, 257; see also Burdick 1995).

I argued that an ethnographic approach might shed light on questions of why and how people can alternatively react against GM crops but also accommodate them. A considerable body of research has inspected issues involved in the consumption of GM foods and resistance to them, but we know much less about the ways in which people have adapted to GM crop expansion. My longitudinal data, extending over an eight-year period, allowed me to capture changing attitudes and provided access to the meanings involved in the resistance but also in the negotiation of the negative effects of GM crop expansion.