Resistance Is Fertile

Canadian Struggles on the BioCommons

By Wilhelm Peekhaus
Categories: Environmental & Nature Studies, Environmental Politics & Policy, Social Sciences, Technology Studies, Political Science, Business, Economics & Industry, Agriculture & Food Production, Science, Technology & Society, Food & Cooking, Environmental Protection & Preservation
Publisher: UBC Press
Hardcover : 9780774823104, 312 pages, April 2013
Paperback : 9780774823111, 312 pages, January 2014
Ebook (PDF) : 9780774823128, 312 pages, March 2013
Ebook (EPUB) : 9780774823135, 312 pages, March 2013

Table of contents

Introduction

1 Canadian Biotechnology Policy and Its Critics

2 Enclosure and Resistance on the BioCommons

3 Battles to Reclaim and Maintain the BioCommons

4 Intellectual Property Rights: Facilitating Capital’s Command over Biotechnology

5 Regulatory Capture and Its Critics

6 Capture and Control of Biotechnology Discourse in Canada

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Leaving no stone unturned and no crop unchecked, this essential and timely book challenges the promotion of agricultural biotechnology by investigating those who resist it.

Description

For decades, government, industry, and the mainstream media have extolled the virtues of biotechnology while downplaying its negative side effects. Focusing on agriculture, Resistance Is Fertile challenges this dominant rhetoric by analyzing the major issues around which opponents of biotechnology in Canada are mobilizing resistance – namely, the enclosure of the biological and the knowledge commons, which together form the BioCommons. What emerges is an empirically and theoretically informed analysis of Canada’s regulatory regime, the corporate control of seeds, and attempts to construct and control public discussions about agricultural biotechnology.