2023/12/19 by Andrew Flachs · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development #Global trade, sustainability, and social impact #CRISPR and Genetic Engineering
paper · doi:10.1177/02780771231221645
openalex publication_date 2023/12/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Five hundred years of desire for cotton has reshaped landscapes, built global economic commodity chains, and devalued human life in the name of producing cheap clothing. Since 2001, cotton monocultures in South India have also reorganized genetic codes, continuing centuries of work to maintain the socioecological possibility of extractive agricultural production. This paper combines ethnographic and ethnobiological research in Telangana, India, to center cotton's role in organizing socioecological life for an agrarian world including farmers, farmworkers, plants, soils, buyers, weeds, and animals. Mutually exclusive systems of genetically modified Bt and organic cotton production offer a range of possible organizations of labor, aspiration, reciprocity, and labor. While historically situated in plantation inequalities, cotton production can also make unexpected room for socioecological relationships outside extractive monoculture.