There is a growing interest in understanding how different actors involved in debates regarding GMOs produce, justify and mobilize evidence in the face of the ‘unknown unknowns’ put forward by this technology. Moreover, and in line with the STS literature on the role of non-expert knowledge and concerned groups in the shaping of GMO regulations, there is an ever-increasing interest in understanding how non-scientific actors – for example anti-GMO or groups or non-industrial farmers – create and legitimize an ‘evidential culture’.
In this paper we analyze the case of the emergent controversy over GMOs in Chile. Expanding on the concept of civic epistemology and based on in-depth interviews and document analyses, we specifically examine how a key sector in the debate – medium and small farmers – frames its evidences regarding GMOs, what type of trials they mobilize, and which political strategies are fleshed out.
Our preliminary findings suggest a very particular epistemic configuration, one that we call hybrid epistemology: a mix epistemology in which free-market claims are entwined with state intervention demands, consensual political strategies are mixed with perceptions of strong power inequalities, and science-based rationalities are entangled with experiential and intuition-based knowledge.
Finally, the paper opens a question about the epistemological impacts of the Chilean neoliberal experiment on the positions of farmers regarding GMOs.
GM products and seed research undertaken by corporations only aim to increase their profits and not the population's welfare […] The dominance of biotechnology and the use of GMOs is moving towards a world seed oligopoly controlled by just eight major economic groups […] Farmers will completely lose control of seed use and will be totally dependent on multinational corporations. (Movimento Sem Terra 2003, in Ref. [44] p. 50)
The Brazilian Movimento Sem Terra (MST) is a prime example of the expected position of small and medium farmers regarding the GM crop debate in Latin America and the developing world at large. For the MST the development of a GM-based agriculture is, above all, an attack to their cultural heritage, labor dynamics and socioeconomic ties. The MST contestation to GM development is not just based on technical arguments about the economic benefit of GM crops or their potential environmental and health risks. As implied in the above citation, MST's query challenges the worldview implicitly and explicitly imposed by the GM sociotechnical arrangement. It thus questions how agriculture's significance is defined, which forms of knowledge are prioritized, and what should be the form and content of a politics of rural empowerment. In brief, the contestation to GM technologies becomes a wider “act of social resistance” ([38] p. 3).
The case of Chile replicates, in many senses, the Brazilian framing. Chilean medium and small farmers also challenge key features and assumptions of GM developments – market liberalization, power inequalities and the marginalization of local knowledges. However, our analysis shows that despite this contestation, Chilean farmers are not averse, even when opposing GM technologies to market dynamics, technological development and scientific reasoning, nor to political actions enclosed within consensual and institutionalized spaces. Chilean farmers put forward a neoliberalized idea of agricultural organization, their political role within the public arena, and the knowledge economy they (ought to) mobilize. In this sense, Chilean farmers do not resist the dominant epistemology that groups like the MST attack; they foster it.
In order to understand how small and medium farmers in Chile cope with and make sense of GMOs we expanded on the concept of civic epistemologies [28] and [36] and applied it to subnational and controversy-oriented publics. Applied in this way, the notion of civic epistemologies serves as an analytical tool to understand particular collective knowledge framings, associated with specific ways of ordering economic, political and scientific claims vis-à-vis broader webs of meaning. Specifically, we claim that Chilean farmers mobilize an epistemology in which contradictory understandings regarding the political, economic and scientific nature of GMOs co-exist. This hybrid (civic) epistemology indicates the pervasiveness of neoliberalism in the country, but also how civic epistemologies, when looked from the micro-sociological perspective of discourses and practices, defy well-structured and coherent “styles”. Thus the case of Chile calls for a thorough revision of how farmers are understood and played out in the accounts on the GMO controversies in Latin America. In the next section we summarize how the position of farmers regarding Agbio technologies has usually been framed. In this section we also develop a more nuanced definition of civic epistemologies. In the third section we briefly describe the Chilean case, highlighting the process of neoliberalization experienced by the country since the 1970s, its regulatory framing on GMOs, and key aspects of the controversy. Next we make a few comments on our methodology to then turn to our results, describing how Chilean small and medium farmers assembled their epistemologies – economic, political and scientific. Finally, we present concluding remarks regarding the hybrid nature of Chilean farmers' epistemologies.
