Rethinking Innovation
Reframing technology as a process, not a product
Every day, powerful actors design, develop, and pitch new tools, which they claim can fix the problems created by their predecessors. In our rapidly changing technological landscape, it’s vital that we develop our own frames and strategies to understand the implications of technologies. In 2023, A Growing Culture and ETC Group collaborated to unpack the role of technology and explore how to engage with it through a more politically informed lens — when to uplift, when to challenge and resist. One result of that collaboration is a publication, Politics of Technology. This is part three in a three-part series, laying out key aspects from the booklet in the hope that they spark deeper conversations about technology within our movements.
In our previous instalment, we explored how seemingly technical solutions are often rooted in political agendas, sometimes exacerbating rather than alleviating societal issues. As we continue our exploration, we will delve deeper into two compelling case studies: Golden Rice and the mechanical tomato harvester, and through them, examine the broader processes behind technological advancements. Ultimately, we hope these insights will initiate deeper conversations within our movements to reimagine how we can co-create decentralised, diversified, and distributive technological processes.
*Many of the ideas conveyed here grew out of a series of online conversations that took place
in January 2023 between A Growing Culture; ETC Group; La Vía Campesina; the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa; International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations; and Pat Mooney, and build on a collaboration with the Center for Story-Based Strategy.
As our society becomes more dependent on technology, the power to design, create, and implement the technologies we rely on has become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few. This is called technocracy. At the heart of technocracy is the idea that only “experts” innovate. We know this is not true — communities everywhere have shown that they are more than capable of innovating. But in popular culture, “innovation” has become synonymous with “high-tech product”. Every day, corporations market their new “innovations” to us. But what if we reframed innovation not as a product, but as a process? What would it look like if we outlined the ways in which innovation is carried out?
Let’s look at two different case studies of technological innovation:
GOLDEN RICE
Let’s take the example of Golden Rice, a genetically-modified (GM) rice variety that’s become the “poster child” for biotechnology. Impoverished communities around the world are forced to subsist on single-crop diets. For communities across Asia, rice is the main staple food. However, unlike other staple crops, like maize, wheat, or potatoes, rice lacks beta-carotene, the chemical that triggers Vitamin A production. As a result, it’s typically eaten with other foods (e.g. vegetables and meat-based proteins). But communities who can’t afford those other foods don’t get the beta-carotene (and therefore Vitamin A) needed to survive. Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is widespread, affecting hundreds of millions of people. In the most severe cases, VAD can cause immune deficiency syndrome and blindness. In 1984, scientists proposed Golden Rice as a way to solve the problem of Vitamin A deficiency.
Their concept was to use genetic modification to fortify rice with beta-carotene. Golden Rice research and development has been based at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, and funded by the Rockefeller and Gates foundations. In 2000, Golden Rice appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, with the headline, “This Rice Could Save a
Million Kids a Year”. Proponents of the GM grain claim that a bowl of Golden Rice can supply 50 percent of a child’s required Vitamin A intake. But Golden Rice testing raised red flags right away. For one, IRRI’s own data suggests that Golden Rice’s beta-carotene content is extraordinarily low when compared to other food sources and decreases rapidly after only weeks in storage. Even if it did have high beta-carotene levels, it wouldn’t account for a few key realities. For one, intestinal infections and parasites (which can be widespread in impoverished communities) can prevent beta-carotene absorption. Additionally, the body can only absorb Vitamin A if it has sufficient fats. Even at its best, the beta-carotene in Golden Rice would only be able to be processed by a well-nourished individual. For a malnourished person with low body fat, the Golden Rice would need to be cooked with oil, which that person would likely be unable to afford. Golden Rice has also suffered from “yield drag”. In other words, when compared with seeds that are identical except for the beta-carotene trait, Golden Rice produces a lower yield.
In 2014, eleven years after Time Magazine proclaimed Golden Rice a saviour, IRRI itself stated, ‘‘it has not yet been determined whether daily consumption of Golden Rice does improve the vitamin A status of people who are vitamin A deficient’’. Millions of dollars have been poured into Golden Rice research and development to solve a specific problem: Vitamin A deficiency. But in the Philippines, where those efforts have been centred, VAD has already been significantly decreased through conventional nutrition programs. Data from the Philippines National Nutrition Council shows there was a significant decrease in VAD cases between 2003 and 2008, where incidence of VAD in children aged 6 months to 5 years-old dropped from 40.1% in 2003 to 15.2% in 2008. In the case of pregnant women, the incidence dropped from 17.5% to 9.5% and for lactating mothers from 20.1% to 6.4%.
To summarise:
Golden Rice has been shown to carry low to negligible beta-carotene content, which degrades rapidly.
Beta-carotene absorption is inhibited by factors (e.g. parasites and low body fat) caused by impoverishment that the grain does not address.
Golden Rice yields less than comparable seeds, with a higher economic and environmental cost to grow.
VAD is already being reduced significantly through other programs.
Farmer-led organisations have raised these issues time and again over the past decade-plus, in addition to a broader concern: that Golden Rice, which is patent-controlled by ChemChina-Syngenta, one of four companies who currently control half of the global seed market, poses an opportunity for massive transnational companies to further concentrate economic power. Their concerns have been consistently dismissed, or actively demonised as efforts to withhold a live-saving cure from suffering communities. Despite these issues, Golden Rice commercialisation has moved ahead.
Innovation Process
What would it look like if we traced the innovation process of Golden Rice?
It might look something like this:
Rural Filipino communities are suffering from VAD.
These communities rely on a single-crop rice-based diet due to their low incomes.
The solution is to find a way to create a rice variety capable of delivering Vitamin A.
Innovation Process (Reimagination)
What would have happened if we reimagined the innovation process, centring the voice of the communities who have continued to raise concerns around Golden Rice?
It might look something like this:
Filipino farming communities have consistently identified impoverishment, hunger, and malnourishment as widespread issues, of which VAD is a symptom.
Those same communities continue to make clear that impoverishment, hunger, and malnourishment is caused primarily by economic policies that have liberalised the Philippine economy, removing import tariffs on goods from rich countries. Cheap, subsidised foods have flooded Philippine markets, making it impossible for Filipino farmers to make a living.
This issue is exacerbated by the Green Revolution, an effort led by IRRI, the same institution leading Golden Rice development, which pushed farmers away from diverse, locally-adapted crops and towards expensive, chemically-intensive corporate monocrops.
The issue is immensely worsened by unequal land access, forcing them to be subject to usury (exorbitantly high rent) to access farmland.
The solution is to put in place economic policies that allow Filipino farmers to
1) get fair prices for their crops, so that they can either afford to grow wider varieties of crops and/or afford to buy foods in order to meet their nutritional needs; and 2) get access to land without being subject to usury.
MECHANICAL TOMATO HARVESTER
Let’s take an example of a mechanical technology. Harvesting crops can be a slow and arduous process. In the late 1940s, agricultural researchers designed a mechanical tomato harvester to efficiently harvest a row of tomatoes by cutting, picking, and sorting the fruit. The issue with the mechanical harvesters was that they were a lot rougher on the tomato plants than the gentle hands of the farmworkers, and caused a lot more damage to the tomatoes. Rather than consider whether the technology (the harvester) was the best fit for the environment, researchers moved forward with the assumption that it was the environment that needed modifying. They began breeding new tomato varieties that were “hardier and sturdier”. The new, more “resilient” tomato varieties they bred were “less tasty”, sacrificing flavour for sturdiness.
A study claimed that the harvesters could save growers money. But the machines had a prohibitively high cost (more than $50,000 each), so they only really made sense for “highly concentrated” industrial tomato growing.
The effects were three-fold:
Despite their drawbacks, the sturdier tomatoes started to become widely grown.
Industrial farms started replacing farmworkers with mechanical harvesters.
As industrial tomato farms using the harvesters began producing more fruit at a lower cost, they ran smaller-scale farms relying on harvesting by hand out of business.
“With the introduction of this new method of harvesting, the number of tomato growers declined from approximately 4,000 in the early 1960s to about 600 in 1973... By the late 1970s an estimated 32,000 jobs in the tomato industry had been eliminated as a direct consequence of mechanisation.”
Innovation Process
The innovation process of the researchers responsible for the harvester might look something like this:
Tomato farmers aren’t making enough money.
This problem is the inefficiency of current tomato growing.
That inefficiency stems from the pace and cost of farmworkers.
A mechanical harvester can improve efficiency by replacing farmworkers, thereby cutting down on labour costs and maximising profit.
A harvester can’t fully work with current farm fields and tomato varieties.
The solution is to change the fields and varieties to accommodate the harvester.
A harvester is too expensive for small-scale growers.
The solution is to scale-up tomato growers to fully realise the profit potential of the harvester.
Innovation Process (Reimagination)
If we instead centred a potential farmer/farmworker perspective, it might look like this:
Tomato farmers and farmworkers aren’t making enough money.
This problem is caused by a lack of government policy regulating the price of tomatoes. Without a system of parity, the cost of farming continues to increase at a rate disproportionate to the selling price of tomatoes.
The solution is to implement policies/laws that restore a system of parity, so that farmers growing at different scales can sustain their livelihoods.
Today, we are surrounded by powerful technologies that have made their way into nearly every aspect of our lives. It can feel as though technology is something beyond our capacity to understand, to assess, and to control, and it can be tempting to take a binary stance on technology itself — to brand all technologies as either good or bad. But what if we shifted towards the stance that all technology is political? What if we recognised that every technology has the potential to give power to some, and take away the power of others? And what if we understood the root of that power as the ability to define how we should exist on this planet?
Technologies are the product of social, economic, political, and ecological processes. The processes that shape technologies can help create technological systems that disrupt and alter society in profound ways. Pat Mooney proposes a simple theory:
“A powerful technology introduced into an unjust society will always increase the gap between the powerful and the powerless.”
Leaning on Mooney’s claim, products reflect processes, and as long as the innovation process remains centralised and homogenous, we will continue to see technologies that centralise power. In order to realise the need for decentralised, diversified, and distributive technologies, we’ll first need to organise and advocate for decentralised, diversified, and distributive processes. In other words, the starting point for our struggle is not what a technology does, but who has the right to control the steps that led to its creation. Langdon Winner puts forward a concept of what a more equitable process could look like:
“Faced with any proposal for a new technological system, citizens or their representatives would examine the social contract implied by building that system in a particular form. They would ask, How well do the proposed conditions match our best sense of who we are and what we want this society to be? Who gains and who loses power in the proposed change? Are the conditions produced by the change compatible with equality, social justice, and the common good? To nurture this process would require building institutions in which the claims of technical expertise and those of a democratic citizenry would regularly meet face to face. Here the crucial deliberations would take place, revealing the substance of each person’s arguments and interests. The heretofore concealed importance of technological choices would become a matter for explicit study and debate.”
This effort to assert our right to analyse and evaluate the conditions created by technological tools and systems is the work of technological politics. It is, like any political struggle, a negotiation of visions and values for the world we want to see for ourselves and for future generations. It is just as messy and complex a struggle as any other. But it can begin simply: by first claiming back our power to define and re-embed technology within our narratives and our lives.
You can access the complete booklet on the Politics of Technology in three languages here.
This article by FIAN International on the urgent need for data rights within agriculture
This article by Erik Nicholson and Alexia Estrada on the idea that a real “agricultural revolution” doesn’t mean autonomous farming robots — it means centring the rights and knowledge of farmworkers.
This website by ETC Group, sharing case studies and resources related to technology assessment.
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