Biotechnology, sound science, and the Foreign Agricultural Service: a case study in neoliberal rollout

This paper addresses the ways in which policy coordination, and technical assistance and training programs operated by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) have helped produce, internationalize, and enforce a neoliberal approach to the regulation of biotechnology, genetically modified crops, and food safety, through the reductionist discourse of sound science. The internationalization of US standards forms a major component of US agrofood trade strategies, while the contentious nature of biotechnology within international trade makes standards harmonization an important political battleground within ongoing processes of neoliberalization. Relying on appeals to sound science that posit US regulations as scientific and objective, and therefore superior to other regulatory models, FAS facilitates the rollout of neoliberal institutions within both the US state and in developing and post-Communist countries to harmonize biotechnology and food safety standards in line with US-led neoliberalization and capitalist internationalization. I examine the political and scientific contours of the sound science discourse, and offer two examples through which FAS has incorporated and deployed sound science in undertaking neoliberal rollout—first by creating a new internal Biotechnology Group, and second through focusing aspects of its Cochran Fellowship Program, a longstanding development and training program for foreign regulators, on biotechnology issues.