The erosion of agrobiodiversity of cotton in India: interplay of politics, science, and technology

The dissection of the contemporary cotton crisis in India has cast light on knowledge and deskilling, capitalism and commodification, biotechnology and public policy, Bt cotton and yield, diseases and management, etc. Whereas how agricultural-technology, plant breeding and biotechnology, have influenced cotton agriculture reciprocating to global demand is rarely invoked in the political-ecological analyses. Here, employing various data, I reconstructed the trajectory of cotton agrobiodiversity and underlying drivers nestled in the broad technopolitics of the last century. It revealed that a major change in the twentieth century was steered by cotton improvement through breeding when a few varieties of American cotton with industry-set staple-length have gained precedence, causing the continued abandonment of native species. The process was exacerbated by the large-scale adoption of the hybrids in the seventies and eighties. Increasing genetic homogeneity unleashed bollworm infestation that raised the pesticide application and cost of cultivation. Later, genetically modified Bt cotton was widely adopted in the twenty-first century to circumvent this problem. Genetic erosion driven by global technopolitical change has raised the vulnerability to major diseases, especially bollworm, wreaking havoc across geographies and culminating in agrarian distress. The study seems to lay a foundation for future research on the entanglement between technopolitical, bio-cultural, and agrarian change.