Resistance Is Fertile

For decades, government, industry, and the mainstream media have extolled the virtues of biotechnology, downplaying its negative side effects and claiming that it can improve everything from our health and diet to our environment and economy.

Focusing on agricultural biotechnology, Resistance Is Fertile challenges this dominant rhetoric by offering a critical analysis of the role of capital and the state in the development of this technoscience. Wilhelm Peekhaus analyzes the major issues around which opponents of agricultural biotechnology in Canada are mobilizing resistance – namely, the enclosure of the biological commons and the knowledge commons, which together form the BioCommons. What emerges is an empirically and theoretically informed analysis of topics such as Canada’s regulatory regime, the corporate control of seeds, the intellectual property system, and attempts to construct and control public discussions about agricultural biotechnology.