Crop-Making: Plant Breeding, Botany, and Political Economies of Production

The role of plant breeding in mediating the relationships between the botanical-reproductive dynamics of plants and the demands of commodity systems has been a quiet recurring thread in the agrifood studies literature on crops (for example Soluri (2005) for bananas, Guthman (2019) for strawberries, Legun (2015) on apples). In this paper, we focus centrally on plant breeding as a socially situated activity that materially integrates the botanical reproductive functions of plants with the demands of commodity chains and global production systems and the local cultural and political contexts. Breeding programs define a crop’s botany, geography, and (re-)production politics at the same time through specific practices and socio-cultural relations. Through empirical explorations and comparisons of breeding and (re-)production politics in wheat, potatoes, maize and apples, we advance crop-making as an entry point to better understanding how breeding invests plants with power in the context of the global political economy of agrifood commodity chains.