ABSTRACT
The agrarian crisis in the Indian cotton sector has been apolitically characterized as an overabundance of pests and agrochemical use. Presented with a technological problem requiring technological solutions, the cotton farmers now have to choose between two legally exclusive technological solutions: genetically modified (GM) Bt cotton and organic cotton. This chapter adopts a political ecology lens to unravel the agrarian transformation brought by the adoption and implementation of these technological options in the cotton sector. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork and household surveys conducted between 2012 and 2018 in nine villages in Telangana state in southern India. Overall, the adoption and implementation of GM and organic cotton production have required a significant shift in how farmers manage their agrarian system and engage with seed choice, external expertise, marketing, agrobiodiversity, agricultural inputs, and crop spacing. This political ecology lens helps explain how these technologies change daily agricultural practices by shifting the parameters of success in cotton agriculture in line with state and international political economy goals, beginning with colonial British cotton development projects in the 1840s, continuing during the Green Revolution, and now hinging on contemporary GM and organic cotton farms. In each case, farmers developed strategies to manage these technologies according to local needs that worked for some farmers and failed for others.
