The State, Civil Society, and the Canadian Agricultural Biotechnology Industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are complex ways in which agricultural production, biotechnology, and the interventions by the state and civil society are interconnected. Advanced capitalism is characterized by a general (albeit temporally and spatially uneven) tendency towards technological change in its various forms. In contemporary times, biotechnology is one such form. As with all forms of technology, its emergence is a contradictory process. As an industrial phenomenon, biotechnology may be seen as an opportunity for individual segments of the capitalist class for accumulation of exchange value as well as a capitalist growth strategy at the sectoral level. Its emergence is indicative of an instantiated counter-struggle on the part of specific capitals against impinging price competition in the agricultural industry and, at a macro-scale, of the intensifying decline in the rate of profit in advanced industrial economies. The emergence and utilization of biotechnology both as a means of production and as a means of increasing (monopolistic) profit is part of a wider process of market-oriented reforms in the agrarian sector occurring at national and international scales. However, interventions on the part of the state which generally tends to play an enabling role, and of civil society whose aim is to at least partly resist the expansion of the market for biotechnology, have not ceased, so the outcomes of market-based restructuring in general and the use and consequences of biotechnology in particular are anything but automatic. The argument is illustrated with empirical evidence from the development, adoption, and production of agricultural biotechnology in Canada.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
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".