Many trends in agricultural biotechnology have extended fluidly from the first era of genetic modification using recombinant DNA techniques to the era of gene editing. But the high-profile, explicit, and assertive discourse of democratization with gene editing — especially CRISPR-Cas9 — is something new. In this paper, I draw on semi-structured interviews with gene editors, policy analysts, and communications experts as well as with critical academic and civil society experts. I use Science and Technology Studies and political ecology lenses to unpack democratization in three main parts. First is democratizing discourses: On what grounds is CRISPR said to be democratic? Who is saying so? How do dissident communities respond to these narratives? Second is agricultural applications, with a focus on the Innovative Genomics Institute’s work in developing gene-edited food crops, including a case of saveable clonal hybrid rice. Third is governance, where I contrast US Department of Agriculture regulations and the CRISPRcon conference as “closed” and “invited” spaces, respectively, for democratic participation. Next, I argue that “created spaces,” in which power is held by typically delegitimized actors and ideas, offer an opening for working out democracy on the terrain of biotechnology. I conclude with a set of principles and practices for CRISPR governance based on the idea that democratization of biotechnology requires epistemic justice. By gathering multiple, partial knowledges together, we move beyond narrow risk-benefit framings to better evaluate not just what CRISPR is and does, but what democracy means and whom it serves.

Democratizing CRISPR? Stories, practices, and politics of science and governance on the agricultural gene editing frontier

Who is resilient in Africa's Green Revolution? Sustainable intensification and Climate Smart Agriculture in Rwanda.

Correspondence Glenn Davis Stone Email: stone@wustl.edu The Green Revolution continues to be a touchstone in debates on food production. Accounts generally cite “high‐yielding” dwarf wheat and rice spreading through Asia and particularly India, resulting in lives saved, agriculture modernised, and under‐utilised workers moved off farms. This Commentary examines the forces that popularised this version of events and then reviews a significant new body of writing, comprising five major works by historians. The new work provides a fundamental rethinking of many key aspects of the revolution, including the motivations behind it, the merits of the agricultural science in India that it displaced, whether the new seeds actually led to increased food production, and how concepts of desirable plants changed.

Commentary: New histories of the Indian Green Revolution

India's agrarian history has for the most part been cast within colonial and nationalist frameworks or in analyses of modernity and development in the South Asian historiography on both sides of the independence divide. This leaves plenty of space to discuss both the vast engagement of American actors with Indian elite formations and modifications to the agrarian projects contingent upon those interactions. A focus on the Americanist drive for agrarian modernization in India allows for exploring the distinct cultural location of modernization in a long-term perspective and its engagement with colonial “development.” A study of their mutual interaction gives insights into modernization's somewhat distinct itinerary on the subcontinent and provides specificity to the history of the otherwise spatially wider American intervention in global and inter-Asian contexts.

“Modernization” and Agrarian Development in India, 1912–52

This special issue presents a series of papers selected from those presented at a workshop held July 30 – August 1, 2018 at Yale-NUS College and the Asia Research Institute of the National Universi...

Transecting “healthy” and “sustainable” food in the Asia Pacific

This ambitious and engaging new account of independent India's struggle to overcome famine and malnutrition in the twentieth century traces Indian nation-building through the voices of politicians, planners, and citizens. Siegel explains the historical origins of contemporary India's hunger and malnutrition epidemic, showing how food and sustenance moved to the center of nationalist thought in the final years of colonial rule. Independent India's politicians made promises of sustenance and then qualified them by asking citizens to share the burden of feeding a new and hungry state. Foregrounding debates over land, markets, and new technologies, Hungry Nation interrogates how citizens and politicians contested the meanings of nation-building and citizenship through food, and how these contestations receded in the wake of the Green Revolution. Drawing upon meticulous archival research, this is the story of how Indians challenged meanings of welfare and citizenship across class, caste, region, and gender in a new nation-state.

Benjamin Robert Siegel

Papers

Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India