Emerging Hybridities under Networked Agribusiness in Argentina

Science and Technology Studies (STS) are paying greater attention to the interactions between new technologies and politico-economic orders. Dynamics of promises and expectations with regard to technological developments, and their uptake, play a major role in shaping political-economic policies, institutional practices and wider societal mutations. Informed by the theoretical perspective of co-production (Jasanoff 2004), this paper addresses the political economy of GM soy agriculture in Argentina as both epistemic and social orders. We engage ‘micro’ perspectives looking at situated social experiments with farmers and their interrelations with ‘macro’ phenomena such as capital-labour relations and forms of ‘neoliberalism’. We find that the emerging hybridities in present time’s Argentina are caught between the promissory futures of agroindustrial innovation and the historical, political and material conditions of agricultural production that give rise to these presents in the first place. Looking at three of such hybridities (the blurring of boundaries between modern/national, agriculture/industry and leasing/ownership), we highlight the ways in which elements of political-economic structures and human agency got bound up with technoscientific advances (Jasanoff 2015). Our contribution reveals the importance of the concept of ‘network’ to make sense of the dominant logic of agribusiness and it amounts to ‘rugged’ approach to networks with due attention to the complex topographies of circulating power and morality.