Trading animal genetics : On the “marketization” of bovine genetics in the dairy industry

Abstract: This thesis studies the workings of markets in the specific context of the international trade in bovine genetics in the dairy industry and with a particular focus on the Global North. It draws upon the examples of trade in breeding stock – cows – at auction sales and trade in bovine semen.Inspired by the work of economic sociologist and actor network theorist Michel Callon on “marketization”, the thesis uses a performative approach to the market economy. Hence it does not address animals and their live body parts as simply being commodities. Rather it looks at processes that “make” them become commodities. Engaging with the question of how animals and their live body parts are turned into commodities, it is primarily concerned with valuation and bio-securitization processes and with the role of the animals themselves in the commodification process. Examining mechanisms that allow for the workings of markets in spite of not only pre-existing obstacles but of differences, resistances and instabilities – potential limitations – arising in the process of trading itself, the thesis focuses on the iterative character of markets.Based on findings derived from three empirical case studies, it shows how various forms of distinction are created in the marketization process of dairy genetics, and it demonstrates how these distinctions allow for trade. But the thesis also reveals mechanisms of distraction, suggesting that if markets operate on the basis of various forms of distinction, they do so simultaneously via mechanisms that distract us from the very distinctions created. It highlights the role of the human-animal divide in such processes.The thesis is based upon ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork mainly conducted in Germany and in New Zealand. Triangulating between work on “marketization”, the political economies of nature and nonhuman “lively commodities” in economic geography, and also on biosecurity, it seeks to make a contribution to these geographical literatures.