Biotechnology, Sound Science, and the Foreign Agricultural Service: A Case Study in Neoliberal Rollout

Jamey Essex
Additional contact information
Jamey Essex: Department of Political Science, University of Windsor, 401 Sunset Avenue, Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4, Canada

Environment and Planning C, 2008, vol. 26, issue 1, 191-209

Abstract: This paper addresses the ways in which policy coordination, and technical assistance and training programs operated by the United States Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) have helped produce, internationalize, and enforce a neoliberal approach to the regulation of biotechnology, genetically modified crops, and food safety, through the reductionist discourse of sound science. The internationalization of US standards forms a major component of US agrofood trade strategies, while the contentious nature of biotechnology within international trade makes standards harmonization an important political battleground within ongoing processes of neoliberalization. Relying on appeals to sound science that posit US regulations as scientific and objective, and therefore superior to other regulatory models, FAS facilitates the rollout of neoliberal institutions within both the US state and in developing and post-Communist countries to harmonize biotechnology and food safety standards in line with US-led neoliberalization and capitalist internationalization. I examine the political and scientific contours of the sound science discourse, and offer two examples through which FAS has incorporated and deployed sound science in undertaking neoliberal rollout—first by creating a new internal Biotechnology Group, and second through focusing aspects of its Cochran Fellowship Program, a longstanding development and training program for foreign regulators, on biotechnology issues.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://epc.sagepub.com/content/26/1/191.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:26:y:2008:i:1:p:191-209

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().