Resisting and Reimagining Agricultural Systems in Hawai’i: A Conversation with Andrea Brower

This spring I sat down with Dr. Andrea Brower to discuss her book Seeds of Occupation, Seeds of Possibility: The Agrochemical-GMO Industry in Hawaiʻi, from West Virginia University Press. An activist-scholar, Dr. Brower discusses the motivations and solidarity collaborations that inspired this book. 

Seeds of Occupation, Seeds of Possibility juxtaposes settler colonial, racist capitalist society with the people who are daring to dream about other possibilities. It begins with “occupation”: presenting how the oligopoly predictably arose out of the past four decades’ experiment and hyper capitalism in Hawai’i, how it influences the future of agricultural science and food production, and the occupation of the islands as the epicenter of their global chains of production.

The book then shifts to “possibility”: investigating social movement resistance and the wider political and ideological battle over what kind of future we might create. Dr. Brower’s book invites conversations about how we expand the liberatory horizon, how we build the power for bigger change, some of the things we need to reckon with to get there, and how we conceptualize that bigger change in the first place.

Stream or download our episode here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS

Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cathleen McCluskey: I would love to start by asking if you could explain the title for our listeners and share what the most important thing is that our listeners should take away from this book and our conversation today?

Andrea Brower: I’ll start with the title part: Seeds of Occupation, Seeds of Possibility. I’m juxtaposing settler colonial, racist capitalist society with the people who are daring to dream about other possibilities. That’s what I’m hoping to invoke in the title. In the book, I analyzed why we have a global oligopoly, so a monopoly of four that controls majority of the global markets for agricultural chemicals, commercial seeds, and agricultural biotechnology. I look at how this oligopoly predictably arose out of the past four decades’ experiment and hyper capitalism, so the unleashing of capitalist power in the neoliberal revolution, and then how they’re influencing the future of agricultural science and food production. Then I investigate their occupation of Hawai’i, concerns with their pesticide use, and why the islands are at the epicenter of their global chains of production. That’s the “seeds of occupation” part.

The “seeds of possibility” part of the book is about social movement resistance, and the wider political and ideological battle over what kind of future we might create. As far as the most important takeaways, I think that’s dependent on the reader, or listener and their own location within systems of oppression and struggle against them. For some of my audience, this was an intervention and maybe more dominant American mainstream, food movements have a tendency to see say, Monsanto as an individual, isolated instance of a bad corporation being greedy, which they are; deceptive, which they are; murderous which they are, but also situate them in the dynamics of capitalism. I’m really hoping it helps folks to think about the structural dynamics that lead to a Monsanto in the first place.

And then similarly, in Hawai’i to not see this as an isolated injustice, a bad actor doing bad things—which, of course they are—but to situate these latest plantations in a longer history of plantations, and the social conditions that have made way for them.

I think the most important takeaways are the conversations about how we expand the liberatory horizon, how we build the power for bigger change, some of the things we need to reckon with to get there, and how we conceptualize that bigger change in the first place.

CM: In chapter eight about battling Monsanto in an era of neoliberal cynicism, you have this sentence in that intro that says, “The battle over collective imagination is the most critical terrain of struggle for dreamers of a better world.” I would just love for you to unpack what you mean by this?

AB: The first thing I’ll point out is that I intentionally said a most critical terrain, not the, because I’m not into elevating any one tactic or aspect of struggle as the singular most essential thing. But what I meant is that the ideological landscape—which for the past several decades has been dominated by neoliberal common sense—very much conditions our collective imagination of what is possible in the social order.

So, if today’s common sense of social possibility is left totally unchallenged, it really diminishes the potentialities for justice. We can only really achieve very small bits if we’re failing to imagine the potential of wider change. The godfather of neoliberalism, Friedrich Hayek, probably understood this as well as anybody else. He wrote a lot about what he called the “war of ideas.” And he wrote, “those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion, have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible, as the result of changes in a public opinion, which they have done nothing to guide.”

In other words, if we are just trying to win on the “winnable issues” that are in front of us right now, and if we’re not engaged in a bigger ideological what he called “war” about what we could change and how we could change it, then we’re really not going to, in the long term, be able to accomplish very much. And we can observe how this works with the corporate countermovement in Hawai’i. When large change is totally off the table, when we limit our demands, and struggle to fit within the confines of the present, even really tiny bits of injustice appear unchallengeable.

Even if our struggles are at very particular sites, we need to be within those sites, keep pushing the boundaries of the thinkable. Because when people believe that change is possible, it’s much easier to engage in that. And we make our reality through our shared collective imagination. I don’t mean that in just an abstract way. I mean that if we actually believe that we could live in a society that was not structured around the profit motive, then we could start to make that society. I think that often social justice movements are so caught up in the immediate and the attainable, and these wider ideological questions are left off the table. Part of my plea in this book is to get us to be thinking more about this to enable bigger wins.

CM: I’m wondering if you can share what sort of broader intervention you see this work making?

AB: I’m really hoping to help people who are on the ground with debunking industry claims. The book has also been, and I’m really humbled by this, distributed to a lot of organizers at other sites, because we—across Africa, and South America and Puerto Rico and the Midwest—are connected, and in particular, our struggles against this company. And then of course, there’s a much wider movement. I know that activists in several sites across the world have been given the book. And I don’t think that I have much to teach any of these folks but it’s more of helping to connect the dots and tell the stories in their particularities as well as to add to some of the conversations and debates that are happening within the movement.

I don’t think I have any answers that other people don’t, but I’ve probably reconsidered some things since writing this book… the intervention of introducing folks who aren’t familiar with the long history of colonial imposition of capitalism in Hawai’i, and the exploitation of the plantations and the modern shapes that that takes. A lot of people are really curious about both Monsanto and Hawai’i. So, giving people additional critical thought around subjects that are, for better or worse, “sexy” right now.

CM: The book’s only a couple years old, published in 2022. But I think folks would like to hear what’s next for you, or what you’re working on now?

AB: Well, I’m raising two babies and teaching full time, but also, the movement work doesn’t stop. One of the things that has really been pulling at me is all these companies have been relocating their testing and development, so their experimental field sites to Puerto Rico, which is one of the challenges with resisting individual sites of exploitation. Because capital is global, and capital will move to avoid this kind of resistance. The reason they’re going to Puerto Rico is very similar to Hawai’i. The same sort of social conditions facilitate their operations in Puerto Rico down to really specific details, like public land handouts, public water handouts, all sorts of tax subsidies, support from research institutions, the wider ideological apparatuses that are already in play from a century plus in history in sugar plantation economies. Workers in these agricultural areas that have been divested from that are in need of jobs. Very similar kinds of social conditions. And then they’re also “isolated”—geographically isolated from the United States, islands that can’t contaminate other GE crops. The companies don’t want to do this kind of experimentation, for example, in the Midwest. They’re isolated from those places, but they are still under the jurisdiction of U.S. legal regimes.

These companies really want to do their experimentation and testing within the United States because of the strong intellectual property rights and very favorable regulatory regimes operating under America. Hawai’i and Puerto Rico—these two island colonies that have year-round growing seasons and are subjected to U.S. policy regimes—are excellent places for the industry to be located. As resistance in Hawai’i has grown, we’ve seen an expansion of these companies in Puerto Rico. I’ve been feeling a strong pull to research and work with activists on the ground there because of these parallels and things that we can learn and help one another with.

The other big thing are the themes we’ve talked a little bit about in regards to neoliberal indoctrination and how we challenge it in our social movements. I’m really fascinated by this ideological war that the neoliberals waged and how rapid and successful it was, and how we can almost do the same, but in a totally different direction. I know that from my study of movements past, engaging in utopic imagination and actually believing in a radically different world has been really essential to winning—even winning on small things.

---

Featured Image: Looking out over the vegetable and rice fields in Kauai. Photo by Jimmy Conover, 2020.

Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Andrea Brower is an activist-scholar, rooted in movements for justice, equality, liberation, peace, and ecological regeneration. Her research and teaching expertise are in the areas of capitalism, colonialism, food, environment, social movements and social change. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and lead Instructor of the Solidarity & Social Justice program at Gonzaga University. Andrea recently authored Seeds of Occupation, Seeds of Possibility about the agrochemical+GMO industry and struggles against it in Hawai’i. Twitter. Website. Contact.

Dr. Cathleen A. McCluskey is a lecturer and honorary associate in the Department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences at University of Wisconsin-Madison where she earned her PhD in Environment and Resources and an MS in Agroecology. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on agricultural seed systems, intellectual property, market concentration, germplasm management and diversity, on-farm genetic diversity, data access and transparency, and democratization of science and knowledge. Cathleen is also the Advocacy and Communications Director for Organic Seed Alliance, leading the organization’s legal and cultural advocacy work developing policies that support organic agriculture and farmers’ rights to save seed. Twitter. Contact.