Food & agriculture innovation operates through a regime of IP that values white male knowledge over racialized knowledge to expand colonial ideologies

Like the ideology of improvement, the ideology of innovation is centrally concerned with the extension of private property rights. However, whereas improvement assigned juridical personhood and property-owning capacity based on contingent visions of physical labor and cultivation of the natural world, innovation assigns value and thereby property rights to those that engage in intellectual labor and produce information about nature in ways that can be alienated and enclosed through intellectual property rights. Intellectual property rights were developed to incentivize innovation and creation, and thereby grant limited monopoly rights to novel inventions. However, that which is recognized as novel and innovative is highly contingent on recognizing the value of those claiming creatorship. As Lilly Irani describes in her ethnography of social entrepreneurs in India, ‘those who pulled off the performance of innovation had to do enormous cultural work to establish the uniqueness and then authenticity of their productions’ (Irani 2019, 175). Critical intel-lectual property scholar, Anjali Vats, suggests that this is because ‘embedded in under-standings of Romantic creatorship are intersectionally inflected racial and colonial presuppositions about the value of white male knowledge and the value of people of color knowledge’ (2020, 6). Science and technology scholars have repeatedly shown that the recognition of what constitutes a novel technology or innovation is intertwined with racial assumptions about creatorship (Oldenziel 1999; Fouché 2006; Irani 2019).

In the context of food and agriculture, despite the fact that most biodiversity and plant genetic resources are in the Global South, most patents and intellectual property rights over agricultural technologies and plant genetic resources are held in the Global North. As Gates and other actors mobilize the ideology of innovation to extend intellectual property rights across the Global South, they reproduce racial regimes of ownership over knowledge. Indeed, across the African continent, the Gates Foundation and its grantees mobilize the ideology of innovation to promote regulatory reform to protect intellectual property rights to facilitate the development and marketing of proprietary technologies that will ‘modernize’ underdeveloped economies. To do so, they draw on two strategies. First, the Gates Foundation and its grantees directly promote the institutionalization of the intellectual property regime embedded within a network of transnational legal mechanisms, such as the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and other international treaties aimed at commercializing seed systems and the recognition of plant breeders’ rights (Pechlaner 2012). Second, they seek to stimulate demand for proprietary technologies by financing the development of these technologies and facilitating public-private partnerships to encourage the adoption of commercial inputs.