ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the emerging bioeconomy, a tangle of ill-defined utopias that have arisen in acknowledgement of the intensifying confrontation of modern industry with planetary processes. Although dampened by the lingering economic crisis, an official discourse anticipating an evolutionary leap to a knowledge-based bioeconomy has maintained currency in the vision statements of the European Union, the United States, and other post-industrial economies. To be sure, the emergence of the bioeconomy remains contingent on a whole range of contradictory neoliberal policies: a selective denial of natural science, the self-defeating effects of knowledge privatisation, and the strategically disposable politics of market-led environmental reform. The emerging bioeconomy is likely to be global and guided by principles of sustainable development and environmental sustainability. A bioeconomy involves three elements: biotechnological knowledge, renewable biomass, and integration across applications. Much of the critical literature conflates the bioeconomy with biomedicine and Big Pharma, but the vision author interested in the concerns industrial biotechnologies.
