Dried up Bt cotton narratives: climate, debt and distressed livelihoods in semi-arid smallholder India

Abstract

This paper interrogates technological fix narratives on the genetically modified crop Bt cotton in India that claim to address poverty under climate change. Furthermore, I focus on the political economy of input markets as the mechanism for technology adoption and theoretically maximizing profitability for farmers. I compare these narratives to empirical reality by drawing on 94 interviews and 151 household surveys conducted in the south Indian state of Telangana, the second biggest Bt cotton producing state in India. I show how Bt cotton has been propagated as a technological climate fix crop through its technical traits of thriving in higher temperatures and adapting to particular pests in rainfed conditions relative to non-GM cotton varieties. Yet, I show how Bt cotton increases economic risks for farmers due to higher input costs, which are financed by debt relations with market intermediaries. These debt relations, which I term ‘indebtedness treadmills’, are intrinsically linked to droughts and rainfall climatic variability in Telangana, owing to the increasingly unreliable agroecological rainfed and semi-arid Bt cotton growing conditions. The paper therefore highlights unintended consequences of technological fix climate narratives that arise from siloing technologies from their contextual conditions of adoption to the detriment of real-world outcomes.