Climate Resilient Seed-Worlds

By Diego Silva Garzon, Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre for International Environmental Studies (IHEID, Geneva)

Seed-Worlds

I first travelled to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in February 2019, intrigued by the promises of climate resilience of high-tech seed system known as “ECOSeed”. The ECOSeed is a complex multi-species and multi-technology seed system that promises to produce drought-tolerant crops. Graph 1 shows the preferred scheme used by the creators of the ECOSeed to describe it. It brings to mind familiar representations of planet Earth as a system constituted by multiple structural and atmospheric layers. In this case, the Earth’s inner and outer cores are replaced by a grain (germplasm from soy, wheat or alfalfa) that has been transformed with transgenic traits, and that is covered with chemical products such as fungicides and insecticides. The Earth’s mantle and crust are replaced by a coat of microbial seed treatments, known as ‘biologicals’ and that can promote plant growth. Finally, the atmospheric ‘spheres’ of the planet are replaced by informational layers mediated by satellites, precision agricultural machinery and digital apps. In this representation of the ECOseed system, seeds become seed-worlds populated by inner and outer layers of organic and inorganic elements.

The two worlds alluded to in this representation are the target of geoengineering projects. While scientists try to come up with ways to manipulate the Earth’s climate, for example through carbon capture technologies, the seed industry is busy finding ways to design climate-resilient seed systems. The main differences between the two projects are of intention and scale. Climate geoengineering initiatives aim at mitigating the planetary effects of climate change by reestablishing the balance between the planet’s geological and atmospheric layers. Instead, seed-world geoengineering aims to help farmers adapt to the changing climate at the local level, by reestablishing the relationship between seeds and their local ecosystems. By promoting interspecies interactions between seeds and their local surroundings, the seed industry hopes to create crops that are more resilient to climate stress.

Local adaptation and climate resilience

As a foreigner with no contacts in the Argentinian soy sector, I did not expect an easy entry into this field, but I was motivated by the questions of farmers in my country of origin, who were desperately looking for strategies to deal with the increasing threat of droughts. In Colombia, I had witnessed the negative effects of droughts on cotton crops. Severe droughts would hinder crops’ normal development leading to very poor harvests. When droughts were less severe, plants would weaken and become more vulnerable to diseases, which also translated into lower production levels (Silva 2019).  When I talked to cotton farmers in Colombia about this topic, they expressed their frustration with foreign GM seeds that could not respond against harsh weather conditions as well as local varieties allegedly did. In other words, farmers connected crops’ climate resilience to their ‘local adaptation’.

Because of my conversations with cotton farmers in Colombia, I became interested in the so-called “climate ready seeds” – seeds that are tolerant to abiotic stress, such as droughts, soil salinity, frost, and cold – and which are often genetically engineered (GE). The speculative importance of this type of crops led to a rush by multinational companies in the early 2000s to identify and patent genes and genomic sequences with climate-resilient characteristics. By June 2010, at least 1663 patent documents had been published making specific claims to confer climate resilience in plants and six companies controlled 77% of these patents (ETC Group 2011). These patents led to commercial products such as Monsanto’s drought tolerant corn seed DroughtGuard™, which had been approved for import in Colombia during my research there.

Despite the attention of the seed industry to climate ready seeds, I found it difficult to understand how foreign high-tech seeds, such as DroughtGuard™, could defy the connection between climate resilience and local adaptation that cotton farmers liked to emphasize. It seemed far-fetched to me that a seed produced abroad could adapt to local environments well enough to deliver ‘climate resilience’, especially in a country where environmental diversity and weather conditions are so varied. With this question in mind, I stumbled upon the ECOSeed, a utopic technological promise that resonated better with Colombian farmers observations. It was advertised as a ‘locally adapted’ and ‘climate resilient’ seed system. In fact, the ‘ECO’ in ECOSeed stands for ‘Environmentally Customized Organism.’ 

Myopic plants

Interestingly, this technology was not being developed by the usual suspects– transnational agrifood corporations such as Bayer-Monsanto, or Syngenta-ChemChina. Instead, the main actor in this case was an Argentinian company known as Bioceres. After a slow start in 2001, Bioceres enjoyed rapid growth in the 2010s. By 2015 the company had moved from a rented basement in Rosarios’ technological park to a multimillion dollar building with high-tech laboratories, and in 2018 the company went public in Wallstreet.

Central to the company’s rapid transmutation into a transnational corporation was the production of a GE climate-resilient seed that linked the company’s faith to global climate change. Initially, Bioceres followed the direction of the seed industry, trying to find and patent ‘climate-resilient’ genes without worrying too much about the connection between crops’ climate-resilience and their local adaptation. However, this approach was becoming problematic for the seed industry. Although successful in laboratory conditions, early attempts at breeding transgenic climate-resilient plants showed poor results when faced with environmental complexity in agricultural fields. By 2012, plant breeders already recognized that “the search for generic drought tolerance using single-gene transformations has been disappointing” (Passioura 2012, 851). 

Bioceres seemed to succeed where others had failed using this increasingly discredited generic approach. Funded partially by Bioceres, Argentinian scientists from the Universidad Nacional de Santa Fé had carried out research since the late 1990s on ‘climate resilient’ genes. In 2003, this research had led to patents on a sunflower transgene that proved to give model plants tolerance to droughts (Dezar et al. 2005). The transgenic technology was licensed to Bioceres to be introduced in commercial crops (soy, wheat, and corn), with promising results in soy and wheat. Bioceres directors decided to renew the company’s commitment to the technology, which was named “HB4” after the hab4 sunflower gene that was used to develop it (Silva 2020).

The reason behind the success of HB4 remained an enigma until 2016, when its mechanism of action was discovered. This mechanism proved less generic than others, as it takes into account the differential character of droughts, some of which are more extreme than others and vary in duration. The mechanism that allows for this type of response is described by the scientists behind the development of HB4 as a type of myopia that allows HB4 plants to partially ignore droughts (González et al. 2020, 4). Roughly speaking, HB4 plants can gradually ignore water scarcity and keep producing as if conditions were normal, instead of reacting conservatively by shutting down production.

In a recent article (Silva 2020), I examine HB4 myopia as an embodied type of ignorance that can be materially produced and traded in markets as a genetic trait. The commercial appeal of HB4 emerges from the fact that it can help plants to partially ignore droughts and, in this sense, ignorance can be considered as an asset. In fact, some scholars have argued that ignorance can be productive as the “deliberate abandonment of skill” is sometimes useful to “improve some way of life” (Proctor 2008, 29), or to strategically benefit a particular group or industry (McGoey 2012, 553).

However, the strategic use of ignorance has social effects. For example, HB4 myopia can be linked to the concept of ecomyopia (Casagrande et al. 2017)- This concept describes how utopic technologies of climate engineering, such as carbon capture technologies, reassure the public about humanity’s capacity to deal with the climate crisis, potentially delaying radical action to reduce carbon emissions. I argue that ecomyopia, and the mitigation deterrence that it produces, has become so pervasive that it is now encoded into plants’ DNA. We are now creating plants that are also capable of partially and temporally ignoring the changing climate.

Region specific microbes

HB4 success was however not a generalized phenomenon in the seed industry. The widespread difficulties experienced by plant breeders when trying to produce generic climate-resilient seeds, gave place to alternative strategies based on making seeds ‘region-specific’. To a large extent, the attention turned to soils and bacteria. Ground-breaking microbial research (Turnbaugh et al. 2006) led plant scientists to believe that plant-microbial relationships could be manipulated for the production of synergies that enhanced crops’ performance in difficult environmental conditions. If plant breeders could identify the microbial communities that made certain places more adequate for the production of crops under extreme weather conditions, these bacteria could be brought to the seed or imported into agricultural soils as commercial products (Iansiti, Toffel, and Snively 2016, 6). Following this trend, Bioceres’ directors decided to promote a systemic approach that combined the HB4 technology with novel microbial seed treatments, a combination that would become the basis of the ECOSeed.

Microbial seed treatments had been common in the seed industry for a long time, mostly as inoculants that helped plants capture nitrogen, providing them with a fertilizing effect. In the Argentinian ECOSeed, however, soil bacteria appeared as a completely different actant capable of promoting harmonious relationships between plants and “place”. I have argued elsewhere (Silva 2021) that bacterial products have emerged as a technology of localization, traversed by racialized understandings of native-natures that connect geographical places to ‘native’ biological qualities. John Hartigan (2017, 58) has referred to these racialized approaches as ‘racial thinking’ with regards to plant conservation initiatives. However, I show that soil bacteria defy racial classifications, as they live through complex relations with soil and other microorganisms that cannot be reduced to their place of origin (Silva 2021).

Despite their shortcomings, bacterial technologies of localization provide a departure from abstract notions of space in industrial agriculture, where soils are usually seen as the background of crop cultivation, and where soil nutritional differences are to be minimized through agrichemical interventions. Instead, novel seed systems such as the ECOSeed begin to conceive of place as a set of multispecies relations that deserve attention, before new plant organisms can be successfully introduced. This departure from abstract notions of space is by no means radical. Transformed into technologies of localization, soil bacteria acquire a new sense of value attracting new waves of deterritorialization and commodification, and thus of spatial abstraction and disciplinary intervention. For example, in order to help plants relate to place, soil bacteria are collected, isolated and packaged as discrete products, or sold as part of seed systems. In turn, soils are regionalized and subjected to new types of molecular classification. As argued by Lyons (2020), soils lose their unique footprint as living entities whose boundaries are difficult to delimit, and I add, they are turned into bundles of regional relations that can be dissected, mimicked and sold in the market.

Utopic seed worlds

Going back to the ECOSeed graph at the beginning of this blog post, we can see how layer upon layer, Bioceres  is trying to redefine the boundaries of their industrial seed world. The utopic ‘environmentally customized’ seed that Bioceres wants to create is connected inwards to transgenes carefully chosen for drought tolerance. At the surface level the seed is coated with soil microbial treatments that promise to anchor seeds to place. But the geoengineering of this type of seed-world would not be possible without including outer layers that help to stabilize and govern these complex multispecies relations as a commodity. This is the main foci of my current research, where I ask what type of governance is necessary to make these utopic multispecies relations work synergically, and what does this governance entail for farmers and their more-than-human companions. 

References

Casagrande, David, E.C. Jones, F.S. Wyndham, J.R. Stepp, and R. Zarger. 2017. “Ecomyopia in the Anthropocene.” Anthropology Today 33 (1): 23–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12326.

Dezar, Carlos Alberto, Gabriela Marisa Gago, Daniel Héctor González, and Raquel Lía Chan. 2005. “Hahb-4, a Sunflower Homeobox-Leucine Zipper Gene, Is a Developmental Regulator and Confers Drought Tolerance to Arabidopsis Thaliana Plants.” Transgenic Research 14 (4): 429–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11248-005-5076-0.

ETC Group. 2011. “Capturing Climate Genes: Gene Giants Stockpile ´climate Ready’ Patents.”

González, Fernanda Gabriela, Nicolás Rigalli, Patricia Vivian Miranda, Martín Romagnoli, Karina Fabiana Ribichich, Federico Trucco, Margarita Portapila, María Elena Otegui, and Raquel Lía Chan. 2020. “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Study the Performance of Second-Generation Genetically Modified Crops in Field Trials: A Case Study With Soybean and Wheat Carrying the Sunflower HaHB4 Transcription Factor.” Frontiers in Plant Science 11 (March). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2020.00178.

Hartigan, John. 2017. Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Iansiti, Marco, Michael Toffel, and Christine Snively. 2016. “Indigo Agriculture.” Harvard Business School Case 617-020, October.

Lyons, Kristina M. 2020. Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

McGoey, Linsey. 2012. “The Logic of Strategic Ignorance: The Logic of Strategic Ignorance.” The British Journal of Sociology 63 (3): 533–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2012.01424.x.

Passioura, J. B. 2012. “Phenotyping for Drought Tolerance in Grain Crops: When Is It Useful to Breeders?” Functional Plant Biology 39 (11): 851. https://doi.org/10.1071/FP12079.

Proctor, Robert. 2008. “Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe the Cultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study).” In Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, edited by Londa L. Schiebinger and Robert Proctor. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.

Silva, Diego. 2019. “Tres Lógicas de Acción y Reacción Para La Monopolización de Los Mercados de Semillas En Colombia.” Revista Colombiana de Antropología 55 (2): 9–37. https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X.795.

———. 2020. “Keep Calm and Carry on: Climate Ready Crops and the Genetic Codification of Climate Ignorance.” Science Technology & Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920974092.

———. 2021. “From Standard to Region-Specific Monocrops: Localizing Industrial Agriculture through Microbes’ Taste of Place.” TSANTSA – Journal of the Swiss Anthropological Association 26 (June): 18–36. https://doi.org/10.36950/tsantsa.2021.26.6921.

Turnbaugh, Peter J., Ruth E. Ley, Michael A. Mahowald, Vincent Magrini, Elaine R. Mardis, and Jeffrey I. Gordon. 2006. “An Obesity-Associated Gut Microbiome with Increased Capacity for Energy Harvest.” Nature 444 (7122): 1027–31. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05414.

Watson, Geronimo, Lucas Paultroni, Sergio Simonsini, and Enrique Lopez. 2019. “HB4 White Paper - Version 1.0.” Rosario Argentina: Bioceres.