Scaling nature: Technoscience, GMOs and the South Korean seed industry.

摘要

This study examines how the extension of intellectual property rights into plant genetic materials, previously non-capitalist realms, has affected the transformation of the seed industry and economic and ecological sustainability of rural areas in South Korea. Through three key components of the study---critical analyses of recent mergers and acquisitions of major Korean seed companies by foreign transnational seed corporations in 1998-99, quasi-ethnographic analyses of the production and commodification of genetically modified plants, and a case study of a seed dispute between Korean farmers and a foreign transnational corporation---I examine how the privatization of plant genetic resources and the consequent transformation of the seed industry at the global scale have been realized in the context of a particular nation-state. At the heart of my dissertation is the argument that economic processes including transnational seed corporations' global strategies and the commodification of nature are facilitated and limited by myriad "non-economic" practices. These range from the laboratory practices of plant scientists (in which the lively materiality of non-human nature plays a key role), and nation-states' particularities (e.g. the legacy of the South Korean developmental state, political cultures around food in South Korea and different nation-states' regulations), to the extension of patent laws into plant genetic resources in international agreements. A case study of a seed dispute exemplifies current struggles over the unpredictable economic and ecological consequences of 'newly produced nature,' and traces the resistance of Korean farmers to the strategies of transnational seed corporations. This study also draws on critical human geography's insights into the production of scale. The production of scale and scalar politics are important for technoscientific and political-economic practices, from how plant genetic materials are produced and property rights extended to these previously non-capitalist realms, to transnational seed corporations' strategies, their geographical configuration, and farmers' resistance strategies. This study also shows that these geographical and economic configurations are often precarious and frequently contested.