Environment and Planning A 1998, volume 30, pages 1151 -1163

Nature's place in the technological transformation of agriculture: some reflections on the recombinant BST controversy in the USA

F H Buttel Department of Rural Sociology and Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1450 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA; e-mail: buttel@ssc.wisc.edu Received 3 April 1997; in revised form 17 December 1997

Abstract. In this paper I focus on the interactions between technological transformation of agrofood systems and the construction of discursive linkages between rurality and nature. I draw on Giddens's notion of time-space distanciation to show how the spatial configuration of modern agrofood systems creates possibilities but also imposes limits on discourses about agriculture and nature. Using some observations from the bovine somatotropin (BST) experience, I demonstrate that prospective technological transformations significantly influence the struggle for 'control of the natural' among the diversity of actors in the dairy-products commodity chain. Proponents and opponents of BST aimed to occupy the discursive high ground of 'the natural' in making their appeals to farmers, consumers, and policymakers. As it became clearer in the late 1980s that BST would not prove to be the revolutionary biotechnology product that proponents had originally claimed, both proponents and opponents significantly altered the substance of their discursive claims about what constitutes the natural. This suggests that vocabularies of nature are a flexible modality for contesting the course of social change in agrofood systems. Actors in the BST controversy not only contested the natural status of artifacts and practices such as the use of BST technology, they did so with respect to the social institutions of agricultural research and agricultural policy as well. Some legacies of the struggle for control of the natural in US dairying and in agrofood systems in general are discussed.

Introduction There is scarcely an account of the social meaning and socioeconomic significance of 'nature ' and the 'natural world' today that fails to note, at least implicitly, that rurality and nature are closely linked. These linkages include not only socioeconomic, spatial, and biophysical ones, but also social symbols and discursive practices. Many such images about the connections between rurality and nature—that agriculture destroys nature, that agriculture tames or improves upon nature—abound (see Vandergeest and DuPuis, 1996). A particularly prevalent narrative or discourse concerns the notion that rural spaces are refuges from the destruction of habitat and ecosystems caused by urban - industrial civilization. At the opposite end of agrofood commodity chains, the purchase and consumption of ' traditional ' or 'organic' foods may be seen as social rituals through which urban people affirm the link between rurality and nature, in absentia.

One of the reasons for the increased social scientific emphasis on conceptualizing relations between the social and the natural as involving discursive practices is that this can be a useful counterbalance to heretofore dominant perspectives in rural studies that have privileged macrostructural processes. In the case of agrofood systems, for example, there has been a trend in the research literature for well over two decades to privilege large-scale structural processes such as concentration, depeasantization, globalization, industrialization, contractual integration, flexible specialization, labor-process restructuring, and so on, and their implications for social well-being, food security, and other phenomena (for example, Bonanno et al, 1994; Burch et al, 1996). To the degree that relations with the natural world have been treated, these have consisted largely of analyses of scientific and technological interventions in the structure

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of commodity chains (for example, Busch, 1994) or of impacts on land, mineral, water, or genetic resources (Bonanno and Constance, 1996; Lawrence et al, 1992). In recent years, however, the fact that these structural - globalization perspectives may tend to exaggerate the coherence and the linear character of the processes of rural and agricultural change has increasingly been stressed in the theoretical and research literature (for example, Marsden et al, 1993; Whatmore, 1994). These and related critiques of overly structural accounts of rural and agricultural change have led to some significant attempts to theorize the role of symbolic and ethical discourses .in the processes that link rural people and places with the natural world (for example, Bell, 1994; DuPuis and Vandergeest, 1996; Whatmore and Thorne, 1997). These new discourse-centered accounts of rural and agricultural change have led to some notable advances, particularly by documenting the fact that discursive practices are important guides to social action, and pervasive and potentially efficacious resources in political struggles (for example, Mooney and Majka, 1995; Vandergeest and DuPuis, 1996).

At the same time, there are two reasons for caution about the growing fascination with analyses of the processes of rural and agricultural change that privilege the social origins and patterns of articulation of discourses. On one hand, discursive analyses may avoid the problems of exaggerating macrostructural determinism, but only by substituting an equally one-sided voluntarism (for example, that outcomes are shaped by the intrinsic persuasiveness of narratives). On the other hand, analysis of discursive practices can become a de facto form of structural determinism if it is presumed that the course of social action or fate of discursive exercises or struggles is essentially a reflection of the power of the groups that advance these narratives.

Many of the complexities of these processes are revealed particularly clearly in the case of the adoption of recombinant bovine somatotropin (BST) in the USA, and with reference to scientific knowledge production and the technological transformation of agriculture more generally. In this paper I will introduce some categories that might be useful in developing more nuanced accounts of technoscientific controversies in agro-food systems by reflecting on the BST-adoption experience in the USA. Limitations of space preclude an in-depth analysis of the BST experience, much less a comprehensive test of the perspective I develop here. Nonetheless, some brief reflections on the social history of BST technology and its adoption (see Hallberg, 1992; Hannigan, 1995; Krimsky and Wrubel, 1995; Liebhardt, 1993) suggest some important implications for how we think about vocabularies of nature in relation to the technological trans­formation of food and agriculture.

Agriculture and the natural world A useful point of departure for portraying the complex and contradictory relations between agrofood systems and the natural world is to begin by noting a central paradox of agriculture: agriculture is a 'natural' production and provisioning process at the same time that its practices are 'unnatural'. That is, on one hand, the social relations of human appropriation of food from the biosphere constitute the most foundational— though, for most nonfarm or urban people, often a largely invisible—human relationship with the environment. Insofar as humans are an integral component of nature and the biosphere (Botkin, 1990; Cronon, 1995), agriculture can be seen as a 'natural produc­tion process'. This observation has been elevated to the status of a major explanatory device in significant parts of the rural studies literature (for example, see Goodman et al, 1987). It has been suggested that the social and ecological specificities of most spheres of food raising are so fundamental that, even after decades of research and technological change in agriculture, there remain limits to the industrial appropriation of biological processes or industrial substitution for land-based and biologically

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constrained processes of producing food. Although some of the limits posed by the nature of land (especially the fact that it is fixed in space and cannot be manufactured) and by the biology of agricultural species have been overcome through indus t r i a l -technological means (for example, the industrialization of broiler production in the USA), many of these constraints are nearly as undiminished today as they were prior to the great technological changes in agriculture wrought by science and industry in the 20th century (Goodman and Redclift, 1991).

But despite these manifold ways in which food raising and agriculture may be seen as an integral par t of the natural world, ecological contradictions of agriculture were present from the earliest time that human societies experimented with and committed themselves to agriculture (Rindos, 1984). In order to increase the degree to which food could be appropriated from the environment at a level that would permit permanent settlement, agroecosysterns had to be restructured—generally by decreasing the com­plexity of species structures, increasing external energy and other material inputs into production, reducing genetic diversity, and interrupting coevolutionary processes (Tansey and Worsley, 1995). These disjunctures between agroecosystems and other ecosystems which are not so extensively influenced by humans have tended to be telescoped over time through successive agricultural revolutions, particularly the 'green revolution' of the mid to late 20th century. The 'biotechnological revolution' that is just underway may intensify these patterns as much as or more than the green revolution did.

The 1990s literature on rurality and nature stresses, however, that 'nature's place' in agriculture and food is not simply a product of objective properties of societal - envi­ronmental relations, spatial configurations, ecosystemic processes, or technoscientific transformations. Though observers as diverse as Burch (1971) and Williams (1973) made comparable foundational observations more than two decades ago, there has been growing recognition among social scientists in the 1990s that 'nature ' and ' the natural ' represent a variegated repertoire of meanings and rhetorical strategies. Cronon (1995), for example, has demonstrated how representations and vocabularies of nature can be drawn from in diverse ways by groups contesting power relations in the agroindustrial and other socioeconomic spheres of life. Burch, Williams, and Cronon have reminded us, however, that humans do not 'construct' nature just as they like; biophysical processes set limits on the ways and the extent to which appeals to nature and the natural can legitimate social relations and social interests.

There have recently been several strands of convergent ideas in the social science literatures on agriculture and agrofood systems with regard to the changing place(s) of nature in the processes of food production and consumption. Busch et al, for example, have written a social history of plant breeding from the vantage point of "changes in the way we collectively make nature" (1995, page 27). They note that the most decisive historical shift in the social construction of food, agriculture, and the natural world occurred in conjunction with the application of modern (Mendelian) genetics to plant and animal breeding, beginning in the early 20th century. The essence of this shift—the socialization of nature and its transformation into 'resources'—is now being further deepened as we enter the biotechnological era of plant and animal improvement. Busch et al (1995, pages 2 7 - 2 8 ) note that

"With the rise of modern science the anthropomorphisms used to describe nature were removed ... . Nature was to be made more human by removing human imagery from it. It was to be restructured, reshaped, and recreated to meet the needs and desires—not to say whims—of human civilizations. Nature was to be viewed as mere resources . . . . On the brink of obtaining almost Promethean control over the forms that we shall make nature take, at the moment when nature is more

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than at any other moment ours, we find nothing recognizable in nature . . . . Indeed, nature has been replaced, almost imperceptibly, by the environment". Although agriculture and food raising may be exemplary in demonstrating the

potentials and limits of constructing images of the natural, the observation of Busch et al that "nature has been replaced ... by the environment" is hardly confined to agrofood systems. Modern research and development (R&D) and the restructuring of commodity chains may intensify the contradictory relations between sociotechnical practices and social interests in a good many other sectors as well—the conflict over old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest in the USA being a particularly interesting example. Although these processes are not unique to agriculture, agrofood systems nonetheless tend to be distinctive in that the scope for consideration of nature's place includes not only the supply side or production sphere, but also the demand side or sphere of consumption as well. For example, the very categories of 'natural' or 'organic' foods imply not only claims about how such foods are preferable to other foods, but these categories also imply claims about the fact that the food production processes occurring at the opposite end of the food chain are more natural, and thus more desirable, as well. Agrofood systems are thus subject to contestation through rival constructions of 'the natural' across the length and breadth of what have increasingly become lengthy and highly complex agricultural commodity chains.

Tansey and Worsley (1995), in their comprehensive analysis of the 'food system', note as well that the application of modern science to food and agriculture has tended to lead to two other far-reaching changes in that system. Each of these changes essentially involves the demand side. First, although farm production is recognized to have had impacts on the natural environment, the industrial approach to agriculture and food production, which overcomes seasonality and makes almost any food commodity available anywhere at any time, increasingly causes the food system to be seen as being independent of the natural world. Second, continual productivity increases have led to food sufficiency if not chronic overproduction (in the advanced industrial world), which in turn has caused food and agriculture to be seen by consumers and citizens as more like any other commodity and less "matters of life and death" (page 47). Thus, whereas during much of the 20th century agricultural commodity programs were implemented to achieve food security, green revolutions were sponsored to avert malnutrition and achieve social stability in the South, and productivity-increasing breakthroughs were welcomed by most citizens, food and agriculture are now much more routine and ordinary than they were just a few decades ago.

But in spite of the pervasiveness of the forces of the denaturalization of agriculture and food as portrayed by Tansey and Worsley (1995), it has been widely observed that, in the words of Busch et al (1995), food-system actors are not so much transcending nature as they are collectively (re)making it. Mcintosh (1996, page 53) notes that the differentiated perspectives of classes, ethnic groups, and regional subcultural groupings are providing a continuing, if not growing, reservoir of beliefs, values, and concerns—"nostalgia" and the desire for authenticity, concerns about risk, preferences for "what nature intended", and so on—that can be appealed to effectively through one or another constructions of the natural (see also Eder, 1996). These symbolic appeals to nature include not only cultural beliefs and perceptions of risk, but increasingly the material interests of food-system actors such as farmers, input providers, food processors and retailers, and food-system activists. Increasingly there has been a "struggle for control of the concept of 'natural'" (Mcintosh, 1996, page 53) among these actors in modern agrofood systems.

Goodman and Redclift (1991), Mcintosh (1996), and Tansey and Worsley (1995) have each stressed the fact that, although natural symbols can become potent critiques of modern agrofood systems, food-system critics and activists are by no means the only

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food-system actors in a position to deploy discursive appeals to the natural. For example, food manufacturers have been agile in developing versions of 'healthy' or ' traditional ' foods. The natural is thus becoming contested terrain in grocery stores and shopping malls as well as in parliaments, regulatory agencies, and university laboratories.

Even more fundamentally, naturalization processes are by no means confined to material artifacts such as agricultural inputs or food products. Indeed, naturalization, and struggles for control of ' the natural', may occur with respect to institutions and social processes as well. This is a particularly instructive dimension of the case of recombinant BST adoption in the USA, in which, while appeals to the natural were frequent, the referents for these appeals were as much or more the social institutions of agrofood systems as they were the BST product, the dairy products derived from 'BST milk', and the environmental implications of BST

As commodity chains have become 'longer'—increasingly involving globalized, cross-border commodity chains—and have become more complex, two simultaneous, but contradictory, processes are set in motion. On one hand, as Tansey and Worsley (1995) have suggested, the growing length and complexity of agrofood commodity chains have served to make pr imary or face-to-face interactions between direct producers and consumers increasingly uncommon. Modern agrofood systems can thus be seen as a classic example of what Giddens (1984) has called "time-space distanciation". In Giddens's terminology, the increased length and complexity of agrofood commodity chains reflect the tendency for people increasingly to be provisioned through "interaction with those absent in time - space". Time - space distanciation of food provisioning has tended to provide consumers with a good many advantages—in particular, food systems in which convenience, variety, specificity, and predictability of food choices have been expanded in tandem with reduced cost of food (ignoring, for the moment , the tendency toward increased consumption of relatively expensive restaurant meals and conveni­ence foods). Improvements in these aspects of agrofood-system performance have been paralleled by repeated, but often subtle, messages from dominant food-system actors that science, technology, regulatory practices, and other social institutions have created the conditions such that consumers no longer need to concern themselves with the details of how or where their food is produced. Tansey and Worsley (1995) likewise note that the invisibility of late-20th-century agrocommodity chains, plus the many advantages of these industrialized food systems from a consumer's point of view, have served to legitimate these systems in the eyes of most citizens and consumers—out of sight, out of mind, in other words. We may refer to this process as 'naturalization through distanciation'. Naturalization through distanciation is thus a process in which not only artifacts—but, equally fundamentally, social institutions such as scientific research institutions, farming structures, regulatory institutions, and globalized com­modity chains—become perceived as being commonplace, and thus 'natural 'and normal .

At the same time, the increased scope and growing complexity of agrofood chains may engender some countervailing processes, which in concert may create active or passive social 'resistance' to agrofood-system t i m e - s p a c e distanciation. One is that time - space distanciation of agrofood systems may introduce new risks (for example, of chemical or bacterial contamination of food that is transported long distances, pro­duced under ' industrial ' conditions, or produced under nonregulated circumstances in the developing world) and social concerns (for example, about the social consequences of technological change in production agriculture or larger agrofood systems, or about the welfare of animals under industrialized production conditions). A second is that the increased scope and complexity of agrofood systems will tend to increase the range of social locations where agrofood-system relations may be contested, and to increase the range of social groups that might be so mobilized. T i m e - s p a c e distanciation of food

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systems thus can lead to a range of groups—farm people who resist new technologies, environmentalists concerned about ecological impacts, consumers who disfavor 'MacDonaldized' foods (Ritzer, 1993)—developing a common interest in redesigning food systems. Although this resistance may be overt, being expressed as concrete food-system movements, it is more likely to be passive, taking the form of decentralized acts by food-system actors (for example, purchasing fresh foods at farmers' markets).

The dairy sector and the case of R&D and adoption of recombinant BST in the USA represent an interesting case for understanding the relations among technological transformation, t i m e - s p a c e distanciation processes, and struggles over the natural in agrofood systems. On one hand, the diary sector in the USA is, by the standards of the larger livestock industry, a traditional family farming sector. Dairying also has historically been a 'national sector', in that the USA has tended neither to import much of its milk products nor to export much of what is produced. Milk has also been very strongly symbolized as a 'natural product '—with this having occurred, some­what ironically, through industrial advertising of milk and dairy products as being 'nature's most nearly perfect food'. At the same time, there has been a significant increase in the incidence of large-scale industrial dairying, particularly in the Sunbelt states, and concern about the future of family dairy farming has increased. The trade-liberalization agreements recently signed by the USA increase the likelihood that US dairy farmers and processors will be increasingly subjected to international competi­tion. BST and 'reverse osmosis' (which enables the water to be extracted from fluid milk so that it can be transported more cheaply over longer distances) are two of the technologies that are providing the technical basis for the 'industrialization' or time - space distanciation of the dairy commodity sector. And as agricultural R & D has increasingly become the province of large multinational chemical and pharma­ceutical companies such as the manufacturers of BST, the global scope and reach of these firms have intensified this competition, and served to increase the extent to which it is becoming generalized across the global space economy of dairy agriculture.

But as much as technoscientific institutions buttress the t i m e - s p a c e distanciation of agrofood systems, other forms of science—what Schnaiberg (1980) has termed the "impact sciences"—have been no less central to the struggle over the natural in dairy commodity systems in general, and over BST in particular. The controversy and struggle over BST in the USA proved to be one in which proponents and opponents both deployed symbolic claims of and appeals to the natural, and typically did so by anchoring these claims in scientific data.

Reflections on the BST controversy In the early 1920s scientists discovered that a substance produced by the pituitary glands of rats was responsible for promotion of growth. It was soon recognized that in all mammals the anterior pituitary gland synthesizes growth hormone (or somatotropin), and that lactating mammals produce more milk when treated with extracts of the pituitary hormone. In the late 1930s Russian scientists established that bovine growth hormone (BGH) increases milk output in dairy cows. But because BGH could only be extracted from the pituitary glands of slaughtered cattle, it was generally not available in quantities sufficient for commercial use in the dairy sector. Recombinant BST technology solved this problem through the genetic engineering of recombinant E.coli which are able to produce large quantities of BGH under factory conditions. Thus, although production of BST is considered a 'biotechnology' and is often thought of as being a triumph of basic agricultural biotechnology research, this technology was a relatively straightforward extension of the recombinant E. coli technology that had been developed several years earlier to produce recombinant human growth hormone under factory conditions.

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Early experiments with recombinant BST suggested that , as anticipated from previous research in the animal and nutritional sciences, milk from cows treated with recombinant BST did not have an elevated level of the hormone, and the hormone would be digested completely in the human stomach. With possible health-related concerns presumably having been dealt with by approximately 1984, Monsanto Inc.— by then clearly the industry leader and at the present time the only firm to have Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to market BST in the USA—turned its attention to experiments pertaining to product efficacy and safety vis-a-vis animals. Research on BST efficacy and safety was undertaken initially at a number of land-grant agricultural universities, and later at several demonstrat ion farms. Early results gener­ated great enthusiasm about the efficacy of recombinant BST in increasing milk production per cow and in increasing feed efficiency. Some experiments, particularly those given greatest play in the trade and popular press, suggested that BST could yield 30% or more additional milk, without a proportional increase in feed consumption, compared with nontreated cows. Although actual on-farm results have been far less robust than these—typically amounting to 8% to 10% more milk per cow, and with half or less of a herd usually being treated and additional feed requirements being significant—the early claims of huge milk-production increases played a major role in generating the discursive struggle over the 'nature ' of BST. The higher productivity response estimates were t rumpeted until the late 1980s, when some of the shortcomings and limitations (for example, the higher incidence of mastitis and cow 'burnout ' among treated cows) became recognized.

Although it would be unwarranted to say that struggles over BST were little more than contests for the 'discursive high ground' (Kleinman and Kloppenburg, 1991) of whether the product was 'natural ' or not—indeed, it was ultimately matters of power relations and economic performance of the technology that would largely shape its acceptance—we can learn a great deal about the new politics of controversial agri­cultural technologies by recognizing the extent to which both sides made repeated appeals to the 'natural'. Even more significant than the fact that the controversy was, in part, a struggle over the natural was the fact that the naturalizing discourses of both sides were very fluid, and changed very significantly from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.

As noted earlier, the discursive struggle over the nature of BST was, somewhat ironically, initiated by the early efforts of the 'biotechnology coalition'—the grouping of biotechnology industry officials, university scientists, and administrators, scientific organizations, and individual scientists who promoted the technology. The BST promo­tional coalition originally stressed the stature of BST as a 'biotechnology', and promoted BST technology on the basis of its being a 'revolutionary' advance over existing production technology [for academic expressions of this point of view see Kalter (1985) and Kalter et al (1985)]. Put somewhat differently, the status of BST as a naturally occurring substance was downplayed relative to the larger US biotechnology industry's impulse at the time to justify biotechnology as a revolutionary 'high technology', and to assemble support for this and other high technologies as par t of a global economic struggle with Japan and other O E C D rivals. Although there was widely circulated social scientific evidence at the time (for example, Kalter, 1985; OTA, 1986) that, if BST technology lived up to the hype about its productivity potential it would result in a mass exodus of small dairy farms, the promotional coalition perhaps felt that appealing to investors was more important than appealing to their direct and indirect customers (farmers and consumers, respectively). In any event, BST opponents responded to claims about the revolutionary productivity implications of BST by linking small-scale to moderate-scale family dairy farming with the social and pastoral landscape ideal tradi­tionally associated with the rural regions of the traditional dairy states in the Northeast

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Table 1. The structuring of discourses of promotion of and opposition to recombinant bovine somatotropin (BST), in the USA.

Perspective on BST

Sphere of production£

revolutionary imagery nonrevolutionary imagery

Promotion

Opposition

BST is a revolutionary innovation that will increase the efficiency and dramatically improve the performance of the US dairy industry. (A modern dairy farmer cannot afford to forgo the use of this attractive new technology.)a

BST represents a mindless pursuit of productivity increase which will lead to the annihilation of the family dairy farm. (BST represents an attempt by agribusiness to hook dairy farms on a new technology for which there is no need).

BST is 'scale neutral' and just another management tool. BST is the latest in a long line of biotechnologies that have made food cheap, safe, and readily available. Dairy farm numbers have declined for a very long time as an inevitable result of new productivity-increasing technologies.

BST is a highly flawed technology that should be, and is being, rejected by most dairy farmers. BST is another in a long line of capital-intensive technologies that harm family farmers and prejudice environmental quality. Like most previous land-grant technologies, BST benefits agribusiness over farmers and consumers.

Time and amplitude

Primary discursive axis, 1984-91

Primary discursive axis, 1992-present

a Where appropriate, discursive variations between farm and nonfarm proponents or opponents are noted by placing claims from the farmer point of view in parentheses.

and Upper Midwest. The prospective mass annihilation of tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of family dairy farms through productivity-increasing BST technology was thus portrayed by the opposition as being an unnatural outcome for US rural society.

Whether one interprets the early discourse of BST promotion as an error in judgment by the biotechnology coalition and BST manufacturers or as a reflection of the tenor of the time, this early promotional discourse would ultimately lead to the discursive high ground over BST—and, for that matter, agricultural biotechnology as a whole—being contested on grounds of its naturalness. But as suggested earlier regarding the response to the biotechnology coalitions efforts to tout BST in the public arena, appeals to ' the natural ' were employed both by proponents and by opponents, and in very diverse ways. In particular, appeals to the natural have extended well beyond matters such as the environmental implications of BST—which, interestingly enough, were never a serious issue despite the fact that the sustainable agriculture movement has been a very strong component of the anti-BST coalition. Claims of naturalness have included a number of mostly nonenvironmental realms such as the legitimacy of public agricultural research institutions, and whether it is 'natural ' for the family dairy farm to be in decline.

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Table 1 (continued)

Sphere of consumption£

naturalness of BST-produced milk

role of scientific authority

rights of consumers

BST occurs 'naturally' in milk, so that BST-produced milk is just as natural as regular milk.

BST differs from naturally occurring BST in its amino acid sequence. BST milk is not natural because it contains elevated levels of IGF-1. It is not natural to inject cows with an agent that leads to cow 'burnout'.

Science tells us that BST-produced milk is completely safe.

Secondary discursive axis, 1992-present

Science has failed us in the past about the safety of agricultural inputs and food products, and this could very well happen again in the case of BST. (Farmers must listen to the concerns of consumers and reject BST use if a sizable share of consumers would prefer BST-free milk.)

Secondary discursive axis, 1993-95

Consumers are being deceived by food activists who raise fears about BST. Consumers deserve not to be unnecessarily stirred up by propaganda and product labels that suggest imaginery problems with BST-produced milk, or suggest that BST-produced milk differs from milk from untreated cows.

Consumers have the right to know about the conditions of production of the commodities they buy, and to be able to accept or reject products on the basis of their personal preferences or ethical beliefs. Consumers who prefer more wholesome products need detailed product labels so that they can exercise choice in the marketplace. Therefore, labeling of milk should be permitted.

Secondary discursive axis, 1993-94

In table 1 I provide a summary of the most crucial lines of discursive struggle over BST from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Several points about the discursive aspects of the BST controversy reported in the table warrant mention here. First, the table shows that there have been major changes over time in the primary and secondary axes of discursive struggle, and that this struggle involved matters both from the sphere of production to the sphere of consumption. As suggested earlier in the paper, BST technology proved to be a lightning rod for crystallizing a broad, but diverse, discourse coalition involving groups from many points along the dairy commodity chain.

Second, al though the BST promot ional coalition was caught off guard by the extent to which its opponents coalesced around concerns and claims about ostensible threats from BST to the naturalness of dairy products and the dairy commodi ty system, it was able to reverse its field and effectively to claim some of the discursive high ground through naturalizing or renaturalizing several interrelated phenomena . The promotional coalition made effective claims that BST is not a sharp break from the USA's long-standing track record of agricultural productivity increase; agricultural research institutions were said to have developed new 'biotechnologies' such as

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improved crop varieties and animal breeds for many decades. The promotional coalition thus aimed to 'naturalize' BST and other biotechnologies by associating them with the many past successes of the USA's public agricultural research system. Opponents of BST or of biotechnology in general, however, tended to respond by aiming to denat­uralize or delegitimate the public agricultural research system—arguing that, as in the past, previous technologies and the new biotechnology products unfairly hurt family farmers, disproportionately benefit agribusinesses, and damage the environment. Thus, the plane of appeals to the natural was shifted in substantial measure from the bio­sphere to the 'sociosphere'—that is, to social institutions.

Third, although the BST promotional coalition tended to have more scientific weapons in its arsenal than did BST opponents, both sides actively deployed scientific knowledge and appeals to scientific reason in their discursive practices. Proponents, for example, have utilized scientific arguments to document the safety of the technology and the fact that BST is a naturally occurring substance. Opponents utilized social scientific research on the likely socioeconomic implications of a revolutionary technology such as BST, and also utilized data on discrepancies in the levels of IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor-1) between milk from treated compared with untreated cows (see Krimsky and Wrubel, 1995) to raise questions about the safety of milk from BST-treated cows. Scientific data on the increased incidence of mastitis among treated cows were also employed by the opposition to suggest that antibiotic use would increase and BST-treated milk would be more likely to contain antibiotic residues (see the articles in Liebhardt, 1993).

Fourth, the course of the discursive struggle was heavily shaped by contextual factors. One such factor was the accumulating evidence during the late 1980s that BST would not result in the extent of productivity and output increases that were originally claimed by the promotional coalition. The oppositional coalition arguably preferred to be able to maintain a critique of BST based on the potential of BST for massive social dislocations among family dairy farmers. But as the promotional coalition backed off its revolutionary claims, and shifted its discursive program toward the (re)naturalization of agricultural research and technology-based modernization of the dairy and food industries, the oppositional coalition shifted its discourses as well. The oppositional coalition challenged the promotional groups' claims by contesting the naturalness of the past and current role of agricultural research institutions in society, and also shifted its discourses downstream to several consumption arenas. Prominent among the areas of discursive struggle involv­ing consumption were the naturalness of BST-produced milk, whether science can be trusted in certifying the safety of BST milk, and the need for labeling so that concerned consumers do not have unwittingly to buy products which they consider to be unsafe.

Finally, it was noted earlier that lengthy agrofood commodity chains may increase the extent to which more diverse actors may see common interests in food-system change. But the case of BST suggests that this need not be the case. The BST coalition, for example, faced a difficult choice when the FDA approved the technology for commercial use in late 1993: it could anchor its claims in concern for family dairy farming and the safety of BST-produced milk (which it wound up doing), or it could have built its case around animal rights and have brought to bear the considerable organizational muscle of the animal rights movement. BST was arguably as much or more vulnerable to protect because of data on mastitis incidence and cow burnout, and because of the fact that administering it to cattle by injection could be seen as cruel to animals. But the opposition movement elected to emphasize attracting farmer support (for example, the support of farmer activist groups such as the Wisconsin Rural Development Center and Family Farm Defenders). Because of farmers' traditional antipathy to animal rights activists, this choice of coalition partners resulted in animal rights groups playing only a minor role in the anti-BST movement.

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Concluding remarks Although it might have been predicted that the opponents of BST would have been able to control the discursive high ground in controversies over the naturalness of this product, scientific and corporate proponents of BST were able to deploy a number of complementary claims of the credentials of BST as a natural product. The fact that BST is a naturally occurring substance and that BST, like all other proteins, should be completely digested in the stomach, was repeatedly stressed. The fact that the American Medical Association testified to these facts greatly enhanced their credibility (Krimsky and Wrubel, 1995). Just as fundamentally, though, BST proponents aimed to demonstrate the naturalness of its R&D having been conducted within a set of estab­lished, socially legitimate research and regulatory institutions whose performance in the past has invisibly, and thus 'naturally', led to a greater variety of cheaper, more abundant, and safer foods. The struggle for control of the natural with regard to BST technology and BST-produced milk has thus not only involved claims about the naturalness of these food items or of the particular food-raising and processing practices; also subject to claims of naturalness or lack of same have been the very processes—agricultural research, biotechnological methods, agricultural productivity increase, and farm structural change (especially in relation to the decline of family dairy farming)—that constitute the basic parameters of technological transformation of dairying and agriculture as a whole (Kleinman and Kloppenburg, 1991).

The BST controversy was shaped by the complex discursive struggles that took place over a decade-long period of politicization. The fact that BST technology became so politicised undoubtedly contributed to the fact that BST was not approved by the FDA for commercial use until 1994. Its adoption was actively resisted by a relatively small anti-BST movement, loosely coordinated by the Foundation on Economic Trends. Resistance was spatially uneven, being greatest in the Upper Midwest (especially Wisconsin) and Northeast (especially Vermont and New Hampshire). In some regions, especially the South, resistance was virtually nonexistent. Consumer resistance, to the degree it occurred, revolved around labeling—generally by way of state laws that permitted and regulated 'BGH-free' labeling of fluid milk. The most pervasive and successful milk-labeling regime was in Wisconsin, and as of this writing the vast bulk of fluid milk sold in Wisconsin continues to be labeled "Farmer-certified BGH-free". Labeling in Wisconsin has been so efficacious in suppressing the BST adoption rate such that biotechnology and food-industry supporters have felt compelled to introduce dozens of bills (most recently US House Resolution 1411) aimed at drastically curtailing the ability of state and local governments to authorize food labels that would directly or indirectly call into question the safety of food products without extensive supporting scientific evidence. Note, however, that outside of the small BST opposition movement, the bulk of resistance to BST was relatively passive, expressed primarily through consumer preferences for BST-free milk that were acted upon in the few states where labeling was permitted.

But, although labeling has proved to be a relatively efficacious means of enabling consumers to resist BST—and thereby discouraging many dairy farmers from using the technology—the BST promotional coalition is on its way to winning the war. Although BST use will probably never be as widespread as was predicted by both proponents and opponents in the 1980s, approximately 25% to 30% of US dairy farmers currently use the technology [though only about 12% of Wisconsin dairy farmers do, largely because of labeling (Barham and Jackson-Smith, 1998)]. Distanciationist naturalization is on its way to being achieved. Without BGH-free labeling, most consumers who would otherwise prefer BST-free milk find it too inconvenient or costly to seek out these products.

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Does the success of BST signal the failure or insignificance of discourses opposed to biotechnology? There are several respects in which the struggle over the natural will arguably remain significant. One is that biotechnology proponents are now much more cautious about the R&D choices and claims that they make. A second is that corporate endorsement of natural symbols could well serve to 'raise the bar' concerning environ­mental and risk criteria that will be brought to bear on agricultural technology choices in the future. Another is that agrofood firms, recognizing how much consumers can respond to food labels that call into question the naturalness and safety of competing food products, are now compelled to resist 'conditions-of-production' labeling in a variety of public policy forums, including international forums (CODEX, ISO) and the regulatory bodies of other nations or federations of nations. Corporate resistance to 'nonbiotech labels'—those indicating that food and other commodities were not pro­duced through biotechnological methods—could well run up against sturdy and persis­tent opposition by consumers throughout much of Europe and perhaps Oceania.

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