https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7114-3602
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ABSTRACT
Most analysis on bioeconomy is based on a comparison of strategy papers or scientific articles, mainly from the Global North. By focussing on the economic imaginary of the bioeconomy in Argentina, the key actors promoting the concept and the promises associated with it, this paper goes beyond these contributions. The article looks at a case from the Global South, analyses the actors involved and their role in the country’s political economy. Economic imaginaries help us understand how actors build a narrative structure to bridge economic activities within the ‘actually existing economy’ and contribute to drawing the attention of policymakers to certain issues. Argentina’s economic imaginary of the bioeconomy places a strong emphasis on value-adding and sees the bioeconomy as a tool for upgrading agroindustrial value chains and industrialising agriculture. Influential actors within the Argentinean agribusiness and biotechnology sectors actively promote the idea of the bioeconomy, and many of its exponents themselves have been conducting research on biotechnology and favour GMOs. Therefore, further research should explore whether a specific economic imaginary of the bioeconomy in agrarian export countries in the Global South is emerging, promoting industrial upgrading based on GMO agroindustrial products, and promising jobs and development.
Acknowledgment
I am grateful to Thomas Vogelpohl, Fabricio Rodríguez and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and Carla Welch for language editing.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Translation into English by IICA.
2 In contrast to Castoriadis or Taylor, I am not as interested in individuals’ imaginaries, but in those of collective actors. Moreover, I do not assume that imaginaries are coherent (see also Sum & Jessop (Citation2014, p. 171)). For the contradictions within the bioeconomy imaginary, see Giampietro (Citation2019).
3 The ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ introduced by Jasanoff and Kim focus on moments of rapture and transition and look at a broad field of actors and governance mechanisms. The concept could also be applied to the bioeconomy (see Vivien et al., Citation2019, p. 191), but, in my view, framing it as an economic imaginary places more emphasis on the prevalence of economic interests and actors and refrains from discussing whether the concept has gained enough importance to shape policies.
4 This ‘actually existing economy’ is the chaotic sum of all unstructured economic activities, which resonate with different concepts and logics, some of which respond more to digitalisation, others of which are still heavily based on fossil fuels or even produce as in the era of Fordism (Sum & Jessop (Citation2014, p. 166)). According to this perspective, we do not live within the ‘bioeconomy’, but within different interlinked economies, which are all shaped in one way or another by global capitalism.
5 The Global Bioeconomy Summit provides a forum for the international elite to discuss what bioeconomy means. Every country sends high-ranking representatives. http://gbs2018.com/home/. I conducted a participatory observation there.
6 This and all following quotes in this paper were translated from Spanish into English by the author.
7 CONICET is the Spanish acronym for Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas.
9 In December 2007, Argentina was the first Latin American country to install a Ministry of Science and Technology, which was a strong signal that knowledge would be playing a bigger role for society and development with the Kirchnerist politics (Gamba & Mocciaro (Citation2016, p. 6)). Previously, these issues had been handled by a Secretariat. Lino Barañao was declared minister; he holds a PhD in Chemistry, conducted biotechnology research in Germany and the US and pushes the bioeconomy and research on GMOs. He was the only minister to keep his ministry when the Macri government came to power.
12 According to Barri and Warren, at least five million US dollars for infrastructure investment and 400 researchers and fellows were given to the institute that developed the patented soybean variety (Citation2013, p. 83).
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Anne Tittor
Anne Tittor is a post-doctoral researcher in the junior research group “Bioeconomy and Inequalities. Transnational Entanglements and Interdependencies in the Bioenergy Sector” (funded by the BMBF) at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. She is a sociologist by training and holds a PhD in political science. Her research interests are political ecology, social inequalities, extractivism, bioeconomy, social movements as well as environmental, social, and health policies with a regional focus on Latin America.