ABSTRACT
This chapter, revisits the political economy of ag-biotech, asking whether new and emerging ag-biotech projects and products complicate previous theoretical understandings. Rural sociologists, drawing on Marxist theoretical traditions in the study of agriculture, anticipated that new biotechnologies would increase corporate control over food production and shift power away from farmers. Ag-biotech has also had a central role in broader shifts in the political-economy of academic science in the United States. Defenders of ag-biotech have often sought the moral high ground by framing the technology as a solution to world hunger and as a means to address the challenges of the rural poor. Like many new generations of biotechnologies, such as those intended to produce drugs or control invasive species, the case of American chestnut restoration moves the debate about ag-biotech beyond questions of food security and rural livelihoods. Hence, ag-biotech has traditionally been at the center of a dominant, popularized narrative of food security and hunger.
