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Porousness and Peru’s moratorium on genetically modified organisms: stakeholder epistemologies and neoliberal science

ABSTRACT In 2011 Peru became the first nation in Latin America to prohibit the importation of genetically modified material as well as its use in agricultural applications. To date Peru is one of just eight countries worldwide with such a comprehensive ban, and within Latin America, only Venezuela has followed suit. This paper takes up this historic legislation as a case study of knowledge production in the context of the politicization of science and the scientization of politics. Drawing from semi-structured interviews of three key stakeholder groups – representatives of the state, representatives of civil society and smallholder farmers – we trace the different ways of making sense of GMOs and their prohibition. We explore the different epistemologies that underlie different policy approaches. We find that despite their divergent policy prescriptions, representatives of the state and civil society approach the GMO moratorium from similar epistemological places. Both sets of stakeholders valorize science and economic development. In contrast, smallholder farmers, while converging with representatives of civil society on policy prescriptions, diverge epistemologically, articulating an agrarian discourse rooted in notions of place and ‘good work.’ They view GMOs less as an existential threat and more as extraneous and expensive. We develop the notion of porousness to describe the ruptures and overlaps in these heuristic categories of sense-making.