Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Anthropological Analysis of Food Security, Biodiversity, and Plant Biotechnology in an Emergent Market

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CUNY Graduate Center doctoral candidate Priya Chandrasekaran, supervised by Dr. Vincent Crapanzano, will research the dynamics of national food security strategies that rely on biotechnology for intensified agricultural production. Such policies have historically had to contend on the one hand with anxieties about declining crop yields and population growth, and on the other hand with concerns about a reliance on plant biotechnology and rainfed grains impacts ecology and biodiversity. The research will be situated in the Himalayan foothills and on millet production. This is an ideal area for investigating such issues, given the enormous size of the population served by this agricultural sector, the government's 20-year engagement with economic liberalization practices, and the recent implementation of a national food security strategy designed to address the problems of expanding population growth and stifled grain yields through the intensification of high yield millet production. The researcher will analyze the symbolic, cultural, and political economic dimensions of competing projects for food security/sovereignty, biodiversity, and development and how they impact and utilize local knowledge systems. Her findings will contribute an ethnographic, case-based understanding to regional, national, and transnational debates about food, agriculture, and rural livelihoods.The project will involve ethnographic fieldwork across local, national, and transnational settings. To gather data on the agroecological labor and livelihoods of farmers, the researcher will spend 9 months in two villages of differing altitude in Uttarakhand, north India where she will use participatory methods and conduct participant observation and interviews. To understand how rainfed grains and farmers are implicated in concerns about food security/sovereignty, biodiversity, and plant biotechnology, the researcher will conduct interviews, archival research, and participant observation for 4 months at key research, governing, corporate, and NGO sites in India and Switzerland. She will also analyze news articles, publications, and media sources, and attend conferences and events concerning food, agriculture, hill ecologies, and women in development. This research will contribute to growing anthropological debates about food security, sustainability in agriculture, and the anthropology of development. In particular, the project will help scientists better understand the social and ecological implications of plant biotechnology, food governance practices, and biodiversity.This project will contribute to training a graduate student in multi-sited ethnographic methods. The research will expand knowledge of global food systems; conflicts over the right to food, nature, and property; and the process of economic development.