Gabriela Pechlaner. Corporate Crops: Biotechnology, Agriculture, and the Struggle for Control.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
C orporate Crops examines shifts in agricultural production caused by the introduction and spread of biotechnology, which Pechlaner argues represents a new "global food regime."With a North American focus, Pechlaner examines biotechnology by drawing on the voices of people who engage with it, both intentionally and unintentionally (i.e., through involuntary field contamination).Technological change, specifically the increasing reliance on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in farming, is seen as the main factor driving a global power shift within agriculture that favours transnational corporations like Monsanto.Pechlaner, a sociologist at the University of Fraser Valley in British Columbia, examines several dimensions of this topic through the eight chapters of the book, including the notion of a third food regime, the rise of canola and the fall of wheat, and legal battles over patents on new biotechnologies.The first two chapters draw on a political economy perspective to lay the groundwork for the analysis of interviews and court cases that drives the remainder of the book.The empirical analysis is used to capture the complexity of the spectrum of arguments over biotechnology.For Pechlaner, the global food regime ushered in by biotechnology is characterized by the logic of expropriationism as a new mode of capital accumulation.The concept of expropriationism refers to farmers losing what control they formerly had over their ability to direct their own agricultural production.This is accomplished through technical and legal mechanisms that shape the context of agriculture, including laws, patents, and agreements that prioritize corporate intellectual property rights.The logic of expropriationism runs through everything that is attached to GMOs, with Saskatchewan and Mississippi serving as prime examples of places that are being transformed into monopolistic markets due to this global food regime.Through expropriationism, a handful of large, biotechnology-oriented agricultural corporations have gained a high level of control over seed markets.As biotechnology becomes central to agricultural production, "farmers have been reduced to dealing with one company, and that company decides rules, contracts, loyalty schemes,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.012 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".