Knowledge politics and the Bt cotton success narrative in Burkina Faso

Abstract Burkina Faso’s 2008 Bt cotton adoption was Africa’s largest genetically modified (GM) crop introduction principally for small farmers, and became its most celebrated success story. In 2016, however, Burkina Faso announced an abrupt phase-out of Bt cotton, citing millions of dollars of losses due to inferior lint quality. In hindsight, quality issues were conspicuously absent from the success narrative, particularly given that cotton sector actors were aware of problems for a decade. Recent data also reveal significantly lower yield gains and substantial inequalities between farmers, further questioning the success story and the evaluation literature it relied upon. Why and how was such a faulty and incomplete success narrative produced and promoted? To answer this, we draw on extended fieldwork conducted over ten years in Burkina Faso to critically examine how the knowledge used to build this success narrative was produced. We first scrutinize the evaluation literature, pointing out flaws and blindspots in the methodologies and reporting of findings. We then extend our analysis, drawing on political ecology and critical science studies, to focus on the power relations of knowledge production. We focus on three themes and show how (1) the political economic context favored the production of positive results, with Monsanto holding substantial power over the evaluation process, (2) the narrow epistemologies of agronomic evaluation produced “apolitical” knowledge that overlooked how local-level power dynamics shaped data collection, and – in at least two cases (fertilizer application rates and seed costs) – the returns accrued by smaller-scale Bt cotton farmers, (3) the knowledge produced via these processes was used to accrue material benefits to Monsanto and helped to promote GM crops across the continent. We conclude that future GM crop evaluations should be more self-reflexive, critical, and transparent in how power shapes the evaluation process and agricultural outcomes for differentiated farmers.