The discussion about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on Africa is deeply divided and contains widely diverging claims about the impact of biotechnology on African farmers. Building upon literature on the ‘good farmer’ that highlights that farmers identities are an important factor in explaining the success or failure of agricultural change, we argue that the identity of the farmer is an undervalued yet crucial aspect for understanding the debate about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on African farmers. In this article we therefore investigate what farmers’ identities are implicated in the arguments about the impact of biotechnology on African farmers. We aim to identify the main fault lines in different accounts of the African biotechnology farmer by analysing the identities ascribed to them in two prominent cases of controversy: the debates at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and the discussion about the impact of biotechnology on smallholder farmers in the Makhathini flats in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Our findings demonstrate that arguments about biotechnology are informed by diverging conceptions of who the African farmer is, what is important for the African farmer, and what role the African farmer has in relation to agricultural biotechnology. These findings remain relevant for current discussions on gene editing technologies like CRISPR-Cas. Openly discussing these different views on the identity of smallholder farmers is crucial for moving forward in the biotechnology controversy and can inform future attempts to elicit the farmer’s voice.

关于农业生物技术对非洲的影响的讨论分歧很大，关于生物技术对非洲农民的影响的说法分歧很大。基于关于“好农民”的文献，该文献强调了农民的身份是解释农业变革成败的重要因素，我们认为，农民的身份对于理解关于农民的影响的辩论是一个被低估但至关重要的方面。非洲农民的农业生物技术。因此，在本文中，我们研究了关于生物技术对非洲农民影响的争论中牵涉到哪些农民身份。我们旨在通过分析在两个主要争议案例中归因于非洲生物技术农民的身份来确定非洲生物技术农民不同说法中的主要缺陷线：在2002年约翰内斯堡世界可持续发展峰会上进行的辩论，以及关于生物技术对南非夸祖鲁纳塔尔（KwaZulu Natal）马克哈蒂尼（Makhathini）公寓小农的影响的讨论。我们的研究结果表明，关于生物技术的论据是通过以下观点得出的：非洲农民是谁，什么对非洲农民很重要以及非洲农民在农业生物技术中起什么作用。这些发现仍然与有关CRISPR-Cas等基因编辑技术的当前讨论相关。公开讨论关于小农户身份的这些不同观点对于推动生物技术争议向前迈进至关重要，并且可以为将来引起农民声音的尝试提供信息。