Les nouvelles technologies agricoles comme production sociale

Technological change is usually considered as given and the only task is to study its impact. This paper takes the opposite view : technology has a history, a genesis, it is socially contingent and marked. Looking at the main features of the transformation of agriculture in the 20th century, it deals with the corresponding structure and organization of the production of innovations, particularly of public agricultural research. It questions the capacity of the present "new" technologies to solve the problems inherited from the very development of the past "new" ones (excess capacity, environment, public health, North-South relations, etc.) and suggests rather to design the new technologies according to the impact we want from them.