Stevia: Conocimiento, propiedad intelectual y acumulación de capital

Many dedicated coffee drinkers today will know “exactly” (at least the country, perhaps the plantation, maybe the roastery?) where their coffee comes from. They may not know from which dairy or orchard their whole milk or almond milk hails, but they probably know that it comes from a cow, or an almond. They should know of the imperial and colonial histories of sugar, with its potent pairing of “gustatory pleasure in the imperio and brutality in the periphery” (Liaudat 2021, 17). But, if they are trying to avoid that very complicated sugar, likely because of its health and metabolic effects, what will they know about the Stevia in those little packets just to the side of the sugar? Santiago Liaudat’s book, Stevia: Conocimiento, propiedad intellectual y acumulación de capital, provides a fascinating, deeply researched, and meticulously detailed history of the trajectories through which an exceptionally sweet-tasting plant called Ka’a He’e, used by the Guaraní in a small part of the Cordillera Amambay (in Paraguay), came to be the basis of a massive globalized market for the sweetener now known as Stevia – a reference to the plant’s botanical name, Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni. In this respect, the book joins the growing library of excellent historical and STS accounts of colonial and postcolonial scientific and economic appropriation and translation, in which indigenous knowledge and locally used plants have traveled (been taken) from their contexts and inserted into the churning maw(s) of colonial and national(ist) scientific research, racialized political domination, commodification, and widespread capitalist production and consumption. We could think of the rosy periwinkle, from Madagascar, which Eli Lilly used to develop the leukemia drugs vincristine and vinblastine (Osseo-Asare 2014); or the Mexican yam that produced one of the first catalysts for synthetic contraceptive pills (Soto Laveaga 2009); or Hoodia, the South African plant used by the San which has now become the basis of a lucrative appetite suppressant in the booming diet industry of the Global North (Foster 2017); or ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic mixture used by Amazonian indigenous groups which has become such an object of international fascination in these last 10 years or so as a catalyst for spirituality and new age bourgeois healing (Sanabria 2021). The examples go on and on.

But Liaudat makes clear from the start that the story of Ka’a/Stevia is not in fact the familiar or simple story of “biopiracy” in which rapacious foreign actors illicitly steal “peripheral” resources and make a fortune off of them (though none of the examples I just cited are this, either). Rather, he seeks to go más allá. In its organization and ambitions, this work is effectively two books in one. The first five chapters trace, in comprehensive detail, how Ka’a He’e became Stevia and hence an object of and for the “universalizing” projects of metropolitan science and globalized capital. The final (sixth) chapter and epilogue move to a more explicitly theoretical terrain, in which Liaudat elaborates what is proposed as a new theory of capitalist value production. His argument, building on the work of Mariano Zukerfield (author of the Prologue, and Liaudat’s former thesis advisor and now sometime collaborator), is that the appropriation of labor and physical material is not – and has never been – the sole source of value under capitalism. Rather, it is unremunerated or undervalued knowledge that lies at the heart of capitalist value production. Indigenous knowledge is but one example; so too is Paraguayan scientific research, the guidance of local traders, and the knowledge that is scaffolded into twentieth-century regulatory regimes in the US and Europe. The story of Ka’a He’e is put to use, then, as an instantiation of this theory of “knowledge-value,” in which knowledge, far from being a new and intangible site of value, has always been a materialized locus of exploitation for and by “the capitalist totality.”

Readers familiar with critical work on feminist and autonomist Marxism, Indigenous science studies, feminist STS, and bioprospecting will surely, even heartily, agree that “knowledge” and its unremunerated or asymmetrical appropriation is and always has been central to how capitalism produces value. They might therefore also be slightly puzzled over the claims of novelty and distinction here (as Liaudat writes, “[w]e still don’t have a good theory of the place of knowledge in the creation of value from a critical perspective” [2021, 21; my translation]). This claim is somewhat confusing given the plethora of critical work on both intellectual property and the colonial/imperial appropriation of knowledge, including in anthropology, STS, and the history of science and medicine, on multiple continents. I will return to my own agreements, disquiet, and understandings of the stakes of this argument, below. For now, though, let me start where the book starts and where the bulk of its attention lies: with the fascinating history of Ka’a He’e and/as Stevia. The first chapters of the book proceed with close, forensic attention, following all of the networks-in-formation, twists, turns, presences and then erasures, and even dead ends that produced the outcome as we see it today. We begin with Guaraní uses of Ka’a He’e, which the author pieces together through the written record, and at times through some speculative reconstructions, given the spotty nature and erasures of the colonial archive. His close readings of this historical record are invaluable: he is able to show, for example, how European accounts from the late 1800s gave credit to the Guaraní for their knowledge of the plant that became Stevia, only to erase this detail in successive accounts. The second chapter then tracks in detail how knowledge of Ka’a He’e’s unusual sweetness traveled (was taken) out of a quite delimited and “isolated” area in the Cordillera Amambay, and, in 1899, entered the published scientific record for the first time, with an article in Spanish, in a journal of applied sciences, by the Swiss researcher Moisés Bertoni.

This is the first inflection point, Liaudat argues – a point of irreversibility, for, no matter how incipient the journal, and how contingent the process, Ka’a He’e now became a scientific object available to both European science’s universalizing gaze, and to capital and commodification. While Ka’a He’e’s trajectory here has the feel of inevitability in its march towards global commodification, the details that swirl around it are anything but linear. This chapter, as with each of the first five chapters, proceeds through multiple intriguing storylines, eddies, and mini-arguments. For example, the author pauses to ask, why was that first scientific journal article (or Bertoni’s second article, in French, for that matter), not actually published in Guaraní? Guaraní was at the time by far the most widely used language in Paraguay. Moreover, it had and has a key presence in scientific botany: there are, Liaudat tells us, more Guaraní words represented in the Linnean botanical nomenclature than any other language besides Latin and Greek. Or, in another mini-storyline, we are invited to consider two seemingly opposite key scientific actors in this early moment – the sympathetic Bertoni, who felt more Paraguayan than Swiss, who was in awe of the Guaraní, and who insisted on the merits of their knowledge; and the haughty Emilio Hassler, who mercilessly critiqued Bertoni and all he stood for. One seems to be on the side of peripheral actors, the other is a near-caricature of European arrogance. But beware, Liaudat argues: both researchers in fact ended up being part of the subtle mechanisms of accumulation and valorization that favor “metropolitan” centers of power. I will return to this important point below.

What does happen, then, when Ka’a He’e, initially a site of localized “use value,” now enters the bumpy, heterogeneous circuits of European, scientific knowledge production and its attendant forms of epistemological colonialism? (The latter phrase refers to European gatekeeping over legitimate forms of classification, abstraction, and language, which produce loaded claims to objective, universal truths, over and against local, “peripheral” knowledges.) There are indeed multiple channels through which the plant and knowledge about it travel (together, but more often separately) from “periphery” to “center.” For example, news of the plant’s existence was diffused both through diplomatic channels of communication and in the early twentieth-century European colonial press (including in Africa), fueling scientific and commercial interest in this plant-based sweetener that could be an alternative to sugar. We see halting national (Paraguayan) attempts to cultivate and commercialize Ka’a He’e, followed by the transformative interest and much more lucrative efforts of Japan, China, and then the United States. We learn how Ka’a He’e’s key chemical compounds enter into circuits of intellectual property protection and then regulatory regimes that granted this traffic further cover of legitimacy. We are treated to an alucinante interlude, which the author justifiably felt was too good to excise, about an unholy alliance among Nelson Rockefeller, the US CIA, and the US-based Amazon Natural Drugs Company (ANDCO). Together, these actors were engaged in some shady dealings on the triple border (Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay) in a secretive search for mind-altering plants and chemical compounds. ANDCO, it turned out, had a not-incidental role in one of the first U.S. patents on Stevia. Finally, the book reserves special attention for the regulatory regimes in the United States and Europe that first blocked, and then, in a 180-degree turn, enabled, a “global” market for Stevia to really take off. Regulatory regimes are also a key point of inflection in Liaudat’s overarching theory of knowledge materialism – they are part of the scaffolding of knowledge and information that legitimates exploitation. These are just the broadest outlines; each chapter is a world (and many worlds) unto itself, manifesting a staggering amount of research and producing an immersive set of stories and histories that show us the complexity of the routes by which Ka’a He’e became Stevia, and Stevia, a global commodity.

With this 255-page account in view, Chapter 6 then elaborates on how this particular history might further enliven an analytic that Zukerfeld has developed in the context of information capitalism. Liaudat’s version gives us a theory of capitalism in which value is generated not only through the exploitation of physical material or labor, but through the asymmetrical transfer of knowledge, including the knowledge of local traders, Guaraní interlocutors, and that was produced by and for Paraguayan national research institutes. Again, there is every reason to sign onto this argument. Many histories of colonial and imperial botany have indeed emphasized the degree to which guides and other local intermediaries played a central role in the production of scientific knowledge and hence in natural history’s function as a handmaiden to imperial economic projects (see, among many examples, Mary Louise Pratt’s 1992 work on Humboldt). And much of the work on the pharmaceutical appropriation of indigenous plants, whether in Latin America, or Africa, or India, has been carefully focused on two central dimensions of Liaudat’s intervention: (1) the longstanding appropriation of knowledge, not just “physical” plant material (if these two “things” can be separated at all), and (2) the complex relationships between metropolitan interests and “peripheral” national scientific ambitions, research, and knowledge production. I am thinking especially of Abena Osseo-Asare’s multi-sited work in Africa (2014), or several ethnographies of bioprospecting in Latin America (including Shane Greene’s work in Peru [2004], or my own in Mexico [Hayden 2003]), or Gabriela Soto Laveaga’s 2009 riveting history of the complex relation between Mexican president Luis Echeverria’s oppressive nationalist “populism” and the story of barbasco and the birth control pill in the 1970s.

Readers may, with me, have many such “what about … ?” responses, invited by the claims to novelty here. Let me just name a few, to get them out of the way so that we may think with Liaudat more clearly. A key tenet of this theory of knowledge materialism is that knowledge is not an intangible resource (as many discussions of information capitalism assume [261]). But, we might interject, hasn’t some of the most well-traveled work in STS, albeit resolutely not Marxist (I am thinking of course of Bruno Latour’s work) insisted that knowledge is anything but immaterial? Is this not the founding gesture of Actor Network Theory? Or let’s think about the other theoretical terrain with which this book concerns itself – Marxist and successor theories of value. Here too, we might expect some dialogue with the large catalogue of work concerned with the central place of knowledge, information, and the not-actually-intangible force of affect and tacit knowledge in the workings of capitalism. Liaudat does acknowledge the Italian autonomists’ work on the knowledge economy and the social factory, but notes that this work is not doing what he does, since the autonomists think this is a “new,” post-1960s development. But what of Marx’s own writings on the general intellect, or major traditions of feminist Marxism (mentioned by Zukerfeld in the Prologue, but conspicuously not addressed in the book), or writings on racial capitalism which force us to think more expansively, too, about what a narrow understanding of the labor theory of value misses? Perhaps these conversations are not the point.

What then is the specificity of this book and its theoretical contributions? There is the substance of the argument – that knowledge is a key source of value under capitalism – and there is a method, too, or at least a methodological stance. At the heart of both is a plea for, and a claim to, a specific and dismissive understanding of “rigor.” This version of rigor seeks to get away from interpretive speculation (though this story must, given the nature of the archives used here, rely on some speculation of its own); to not be swayed by “subjective” accounts (as Liaudat argues, it should not matter whether the actors involved think they were being exploited or not, p. 275); to offer a corrective to “loose accusations” of biopiracy passing as an analytic (p. 183); and, as Zukerfeld writes in the Prologue, to combat the glut of “postmodern relativism” in academia which has really only been useful in “padding academic careers” (p. 10; see also p. 270). Liaudat instead seeks to provide an objective, materialist (or in this case knowledge-materialist) account that can determine “actual events” and “underlying structural realities” [p. 269]). We read, for example, that the Guaraní were expropriated in ways that may not have been “coercive,” but that nonetheless occurred within the context of asymmetrical exchange. Thus we can call this a capitalist appropriation, objectively speaking, regardless of what the actors involved might have thought (p. 275, my translation and paraphrase).

What is the method that provides us with this kind of argument? If I may borrow terms from the practice of botanical classification, the tactic here is to “split” rather than to “lump.” That is, this theoretical elaboration proceeds by drawing ever more refined categorical distinctions in order to construct, out of a beautifully rendered, complex history, a meticulous disambiguation of forms of appropriation and exploitation (especially of “knowledge” – which, we learn in Chapter 6, has four types, each of which has multiple subtypes). For example, in a substantive section in Chapter 4, Liaudat pauses to explain why the story of Ka’a He’e should really not be called a story of biopiracy (that is, the theft of Southern/ “peripheral” resources by actors in the North/center). After bemoaning the imprecision with which the term is often thrown around, the author argues that piracy, is in strict definitional terms, the wrong word. Why? Because, as in most cases documented in the book (there is one notable exception), the appropriation of the resources in question was technically “legal.” And if an act of appropriation is legal, we are told, it cannot be called piracy. This point is built out of a brief history of the term “piracy” as a form of “precapitalist exploitation,” which now co-exists with many other forms of appropriation and exploitation, and from which it must responsibly be distinguished (181–185). The splitting definitional commitments here have a close companion: a ratification of certain crucial distinctions as if they are ontologically given, rather than an outcome of historical struggle. That is, to argue that “if [something] is legal, it can’t be called piracy” discounts the possibility that legality is a contested field of political domination, not an intrinsic characteristic of a thing or an action. Proudhon’s famous axiom, “property is theft” offers a very different way to think about this relation. To make such an argument is not to commit a category mistake, but to draw our attention to the status of the law in shoring up relations of political and economic power. It is a political argument. To be fair, Liaudat does point to such a possibility later in the book, when he calls regulation an act of “legalized robbery.” But here, there is no such room given; unless certain objective conditions are met, piracy cannot be correctly invoked. Even within this discussion, the author grants that the distinction between the legal and the illegal, piracy or other forms of theft, is often without substantive effect; its primary purpose is rather to achieve definitional rigor.

My qualms here are not about “piracy” specifically (I have no particular stake in defending its use), but about the implication of this mode of argument, which runs throughout the book. Of course, defining one’s terms is an important pillar of intellectual work. But the flags planted here do something more than specify the coordinates of analysis. They produce a strong gatekeeping effect. And this move seems to me to run counter to one of the more impassioned and important arguments offered, in a third key intervention of this book, which is precisely about the valuation of “peripheral” and “central” knowledge claims themselves. If the first intervention is to piece together the complex history of Stevia, and the second is to argue that the appropriation of knowledge is a key engine of capitalist value production, then a third significant move in Stevia is to enjoin critical Latin American STS and history of science scholars to attend to reconsider the status given to “scientific excellence” in the history of Latin American science.

This is largely a historiographic argument – an injunction to attend to how the pursuit of “scientific excellence” by peripheral national (Paraguayan) researchers and research institutes often had a hand in the many dispossessions that were to follow. Excellence in the peripheries should thus not be treated as a self-evident good, or a benchmark of development; Liaudat argues persuasively that it often in fact serves other interests. In critical Latin American STS circles, there is a close companion to this argument, which Pablo Kreimer reinvigorated in his commentary for the Inaugural Panel of the ESOCITE/4S Meetings in Cholula, México (December 2022). Kreimer enjoined colleagues and students to resist the dominance of particular European and US-oriented standards and markers of “excellence” for Latin American STS scholarship itself (for example, publishing in English and in so-called high-impact journals). Together, these observations raise pointed questions about the persistence of two related forms of asymmetry: the ongoing exploitation of “peripheral” knowledge, and the colonial-ish de/legitimizing tactics, often embraced by Latin American educational institutions themselves, that relegate certain actors, forms of knowledge production, and languages to illegitimacy – unless specific, non-innocent conditions are met. While Liaudat is centrally preoccupied with the first, he is also supremely attuned to the second, as he traces multiple moments and forms of epistemological colonialism in which “peripheral” knowledge is devalued precisely in order to be converted into value, in metropolitan hands. Here is where I find some irony within the many rich strands of this book. While on the one hand offering a trenchant critique of epistemological colonialism in and through the history of Ka’a He’e, the author’s theoretical commitments are based on some very determined boundary-making around proper (objective, Marxist, materialist, political economic) definitions and categories, held up as the singular path to legitimate analysis, over and against a suite of improper, messier, and more “subjective” counterparts in other, largely unspecified scholarship. This move doubles down on a not terribly-necessary polarization between objective truth-telling and toothless relativism (see Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” [1988] for an influential rebuttal of this choice); it auto-generates its foes and conjures threats to its own status as the arbiter of actual truth, ironically leaving other modes of inquiry (feminist political theory? Anything but Marxism? Indigenous STS? We are left to fill in the gaps with unnamed Others here) on the margins of “proper” and useful forms of knowledge production.

That contradiction can occupy readers for as much or as little as they choose. It obviously occupied me quite a bit. But in the swirling details and deep eddies of the larger story told here, just as in the considerably large space between a (post?-)Marxist, universal framework and “relativism,” there is much richness, complexity, and possibility. Certainly, the story of Ka’a He’e as woven together here is extraordinarily interesting and significant. There is also much to be gained from thinking about histories of this kind, which have been called many things – bioprospecting, botanical imperialism, Science – in dialogue with work on something like information capitalism, rather than acting as if these histories unfold in separate silos. There is a capaciousness and inventiveness in the mere desire to think them together. The sheer scope of the ambition here represents, in so many ways, the joy of intellectual work.