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Copyright of Plural - Revista de Ciências Sociais is the property of Revista Plural and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Relações Internacionais is the property of Relacoes Internacionais and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

International agricultural trade has greatly altered the way food is grown, negatively affecting peasant livelihood and the natural environment. While the literature on this is extensive, efforts to understand how genetic variety is effected within such a process is limited. Wherefore, in this paper we explore the factors that determine the place of genetic resources in international trade. This is done by creating a conceptual framework to analyse different forms of power, a process necessary due to its contemporary fungible nature, in an attempt to asses how biotechnology can disclose power's other characteristics. We demonstrate how the instrumental use of biotechnology has become an apparatus to control food production globally and a means by which the international market homogenises food production. Through the use of a bio/geopolical gaze we identify that this course occurs within the realm of bioecnomics and geoeconomics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The control over what Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008) conceptualise as ‘pluripotent' life has become an essential factor of capitalist agriculture; this occurs through the regulation of strategic genetic resources. We recognise this course as part of a larger project of neo-agro-colonialism, which takes place by controlling both biotechnology and territories as an expression of a fungible power, turning geopolitics into biopolitics and vice-versa. While assessing the power relations and manipulation of spatio-temporalities in the process of life fabrication, we discuss the mechanisms of control over ‘pluripotent' life – genetically modified seeds and biopiracy through patentisation of traditional knowledges – which turns life into a commodified good. This is to say that the instrumental use of life fabrication within the rationale of globalised capital (re)creates post-colonial temporalities that legitimise (re)new(ed) colonial ties. We ascertain that it is the manipulation of life's temporality that allows capital to be (re)produced in the agricultural context of the molecular age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Conjuntura Internacional is the property of Conjuntura Internacional and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Genetic resources are strategic elements for the control and organization of the capitalist agriculture's production chain. In Brazil, this process is not devoid of conflicts, as rural social movements resist the manipulation of genetic resources through contestatory and propositional actions. Seeking to analyze a recent Brazilian public policy, the Food Acquisition Program (PAA), which has a new modality – “PAA Seeds", this study departs from the operationalization of the concept of fungibility of power, which considers that power has expanded to all dimensions of life. Thus biopolitics, in a context of pluripotent life, becomes exercised at the intracellular level through biotechnology. In this perspective, power is no longer exclusively of a territorial nature becoming possible to exercise by the manipulation of the temporality of life in order to control the territory. Through this system of concepts, we seek to verify if “PAA Seeds" can be considered a form of reappraising forces in a biopolitical contentious for the control of the manipulation of genetic resources, specifically the seeds. Based on the instances of dispute between agribusiness and peasant agriculture, we identify along the established analytical movement that “PAA Seeds" is presented as a rebalancing mechanism between these two different biopolitical projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cerrado biome has been intentionally unregulated. For this reason we understand it as a space of (in)security, this has allowed for the implementation of an agribusiness complex that has resulted in the rapid expansion of the agricultural frontier at the cost of devastating its native landscape. Yet, the academic literature is lacking in a geopolitical appraisal of the biome. In this paper, we discuss the actor-networks present within the securitizing/desecuritizing dispute for space in the Cerrado, through a more-than-huma-geopolitics. For this we make use of the Actor- Network-Theory (ANT) as a way to contemplate both human and non-human actants. In order to present a historical construction of the Brazilian Cerrado as a space of security and (in)security; seeking to understand how different actor-networks strive to (de)securitize it as a means to establish agribusiness in the region. Thus arriving at the understanding that the contention to (re)frame the Cerrado articulates traditional and capitalist production with a plethora of nonhumans, therefore, the agency of collectives of humans and non-humans involves a semiology and practices that stabilize or destabilize this collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]