Erinn Campbell (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge) ‘Frank and honest’? The politics of international plant pest reporting, 1952–1994.
From 1952 to 1994, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published the FAO Plant Protection Bulletin as an ‘official’ outlet for reporting outbreaks of plant pests and pathogens. Like other scientific serials, the Bulletin served not only as an informational service but also as a site for developing a scientific community—in this case, a global community of plant protection researchers, united (in theory) by a shared commitment to transparency, interdisciplinarity, and transnational cooperation. The benefits of being seen to be a member of this community (complementing other conspicuous displays of post-war internationalism) were necessary to counter the economic disincentives to pest reporting; announcing outbreaks could prompt a nation’s trading partners to quarantine or ban its exports. This paper examines this tension to illuminate the politics of international pest reportingin the Bulletin. In practice, pest reporting was geographically patchy, reflecting both exploitative colonial knowledge networks and Cold War geopolitics. European nations’ reporting declined sharply over the 1950s and remained low until pest reporting became politically expedient in the late 1980s, even as European plant protection experts surveilled pests in colonised territories and newly independent states. On the other hand, many ‘developing’ countries also worked on their own terms (through various forms of collaboration among corporations, government agencies, universities, and non-governmental organisations) to participate in pest reporting and thus establish their place in modern global agriculture.
Date
-
Working Group