Jane Collins Annabel Ipsen University of Wisconsin-Madison
This dissertation uses the case of the global seed industry to address questions about knowledge-intensive agriculture and its relationship to skill, labor offshoring and employment conditions. It explores a case where U.S.-based firms have moved some of their knowledge-intensive production offshore to take advantage of a low-waged labor market, while maintaining some jobs in the U.S. This study investigates the dilemma that global seed companies face when selecting their workforce: should they recruit skilled workers in high-quality production jobs or should they retain a workforce whose wages and working conditions reflect an older set of norms in the agricultural sector? To address these issues, this dissertation asks: 1) How do seed companies achieve high-skilled output while relying on an inexperienced workforce? 2) How are firms' labor market strategies shaped by the nature of the commodity and the competitive pressures they face? And 3) How do place-specific socioeconomic and political relations shape labor markets and opportunities for workers' agency? In order to answer these questions, the investigator will perform a labor-focused commodity chain analysis of the global seed industry through interviews and data collection and conduct a multi-sited ethnography in two (Arica, Chile and Des Moines, Iowa) locations along the commodity chain of a U.S.-based transnational seed company. This work will expand the theoretical base used to study labor in global manufacturing to include agriculture-specific factors and fills gaps in the agricultural literature on: skill, global-local linkages and knowledge-intensive agriculture. It will refine current labor and development theories and examine what type of effects commodity-specific imperatives (technology, labor, capital) have on the configuration of the local labor market. Identifying the factors that influence firms' labor offshoring decisions is instructive for understanding the seed industry, but also in providing insight into how other globalized labor markets function.
Broader Impacts: This dissertation will advance our understanding of the relationship between skill, work conditions and labor offshoring in knowledge-intensive agricultural work. To enhance research infrastructure, the investigators will present the work in diverse venues to develop networks to support students? interest in creating local research initiatives and to broaden the participation of underrepresented students in my project as research assistants. The research activities will promote applied learning opportunities for students. In addition, the investigators will work with international policy and research institutions on agricultural labor. Findings will be shared with affiliated organizations, universities, NGOs and research and policy institutions to enhance our understanding of how new forms of labor force segmentation reinforce vulnerability and to leverage additional research and program support for agricultural labor.
This dissertation explores the ways in which nature and technology shape seed firms’ competitiveness strategies. My work focuses on corn seed research and development (R&D) stations for the top five transnational seed firms, which today control nearly 90% of the U.S. corn market. I identify the main factors that influence firms’ selection of these sites and the role these sites play in the larger production process. I ask: 1) What role do nature and technology play in the competitiveness of the seed industry?; 2) How are firms’ R&D location decisions driven by the nature of the commodity and the competitive pressures firms face?; and 3) How do seed companies restructure their R&D efforts to protect themselves from or benefit from nature’s unpredictability? To answer these questions, I draw on data from semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observation and archival sources. I perform a multi-sited ethnography of the three main R&D hubs of the corn seed industry: Chile, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Much of the recent literature on the seed industry in the social sciences has been dedicated almost to the topics of seed sovereignty or biotechnology and the energetic social movements surrounding them. While this literature offers significant insights into how industry changes have affected certain populations, it does not help us understand the industry itself -- how genetically-modified (GM) seeds are produced and distributed and what enables firms to be successful. Nor does it ask what draws firms to particular places, such as Hawai’i, Puerto Rico and Chile, where the industry clusters its key research and development initiatives. These are issues that my research hopes to clarify. We cannot fully appreciate how society is affected by industry changes without asking what motivates industry choices and ensures firms’ competitiveness. This study not only adds to our understanding of the seed sector, but extends more broadly to interrogate the role that nature, place and technology play in high-tech branches of agriculture, like seeds, that reflect emerging trends in agro-industry. My research shows that seed companies have developed new forms of competitiveness in response to the reorganization of seed production that came with biotechnology. I argue that competitiveness relies not only on biotechnology as previous literature suggests, but on the mechanisms that make that technology profitable: 1) maximizing and shaping place-bound ‘natural’ advantages like climate; and 2) selecting and crafting advantageous regulatory environments that ensure freedom to operate. Today firms are seeking to remove obstacles to commodification that are hard to capitalize, such as climate and place-specific natural resources. Technological shifts (primarily biotechnology) have changed research strategies and regulation in the seed industry, highlighting the importance of place-specific resources. This has changed where and how firms get value and the mechanisms that ensure that capture. R&D stations have shifted from functioning as service centers that simply complement production in the Northern hemisphere to strategic sites that hold a key competitive advantage in the industry – speed to market. This offers firms the possibility of recuperating research and development expenditures before patents expire, as well as the possibility of generating enormous profits. While the advantages that nature offers seems natural, there are aspects that require expensive and complicated engineering processes. Making these place-specific resources "the key" mechanism that ensures competitiveness keeps the barrier to market entry high and promotes intense global concentration and more vertical integration. While the industry is already highly concentrated domestically, deepening global acquisitions in large emerging markets such as India, Brazil and China are the latest trend. Dominating primary commodity markets in particular crops (corn, soy, cotton) globally has the threat of furthering larger structural inequalities around wealth and power, but also around essential rights associated with food, water, hunger and biodiversity. This research speaks to the call by scholars to incorporate natural resources into the commodity chain. It shows how the biophysical aspects of seeds shape the competitiveness strategies of firms and the functioning of capitalist markets. Understanding the role that nature plays in the research and production of seeds is crucial to identifying who the relevant actors are, where power is concentrated and how competitiveness is generated and maintained. This challenges commonsense notions of power, pointing to the importance of overlooked sites that may not be considered "high-tech" or "high-profit". My work highlights the ways that firms are rooted in particular places and points to some of the broader implications or consequences that firms’ place-boundedness potentially holds for firms, workers and communities. Ultimately these places hold the promise of securing profitability of high-tech seeds through their natural and engineered place-specific attributes. Addressing how firms navigate place-specific factors to remain competitive is critical to our understanding of how place may also provide other actors, such as workers and communities, with power and leverage to mobilize for more just working conditions.
