Technology, nature's appropriation and capital accumulation in modern agriculture

Abstract

Framed by efficiency and productivity narratives, technological innovations are conceived as the inexorable pathway to agricultural development, obscuring the associated appropriation of ecological surpluses and depletion of natural resources. In the past two decades, increasing food, energy and animal feed global demands, have hasted capitalization, pushing the exhaustion of ecosystems to new thresholds that compromise the ecological bases of capital accumulation. Likewise, the hegemonic technological-led path of development is confronted by political contestation and competing framings. Here we aim to understand how current technological innovations address the questioning of agriculture's sustainability. We are interested both on the solutions that are put forward to expand capital accumulation and on the narratives that allow to recast and legitimate actors and processes in industrial agriculture.