Outside the echo chamber of social media there’s a whole world of news, articles, blogs, analyses and correspondence that speaks to the desire for a more nuanced understanding of the issues around genetic engineering.
Published: 28-11-2024
How important is it for us to trust the food we eat? In this Q&A, food scientist and ethicist Ralph Early argues that trust and honesty are fundamental to the relationship between governments, citizens and food producers and should inform how we interact with the environment and regulate emerging food technologies.
Published: 31-10-2024
Engineered puffins, facial recognition for wildlife, ‘disestablishment’ of crucial horizon-scanning and disregard for international treaties. As COP16 wraps up in Cali, Colombia, here’s a trick-or-treat guide to what, sort of, just happened.
Published: 26-09-2024
A new report from A Bigger Conversation argues that the concept of sustainability has become distorted and compromised, and needs to be radically rethought. It explores how we can shift to a life-centric approach, linked to a core philosophy that sustainability must first and foremost sustain life.
Published: 28-05-2024
A new report from A Bigger Conversation shows that while agroecological farmers, working in a values-based system, have an interest in technology that serves those values, they have little interest in technology that does not. Its findings emphasise the importance of a more critical and context-specific approach to technological innovation, which contrasts with ‘hard sell’ of Agriculture 4.0.
Published: 14-11-2023
At its core, powerful institutions have exploited public confidence and trust that science is produced in a neutral and impartial manner. But when private industry information is not subject to robust debate and challenge, it’s propaganda. Call it what it is and we might be able to start changing things.
Published: 28-10-2023
Genetically engineered organisms in agriculture are, first and foremost, a food system and environmental issue. In recent years the UK government has sought to recontextualise them as a science and innovation issue divorced from their real world uses and consequences. Our 2024 manifesto calls for GMOs to be put back in their rightful context and for this to be the basis for rational policy and regulation of agricultural genetic technologies.
Published: 29-06-2023
Do agroecological farmers need to ‘tech up’ to be more sustainable? Our Agroecological Intelligence project, brings together UK farmers from across the agroecological spectrum – including as organic, biodynamic, permaculture, food sovereignty, nature friendly, pasture-fed and regenerative – with the aim of understanding what they want from technology and how they make choices around it. Read the interim report.
Published: 11-12-2022
The UK’s Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill, currently making its way through Parliament, allows gene editing of wild and free-living species. Shouldn’t we be talking about that?
Published: 31-10-2022
The UK government has committed itself to deregulating genetically engineered organisms created using new ‘gene editing’ technologies. But how well do its proposals align with those elsewhere in the world?
Published: 14-10-2022
A new public dialogue on gene edited farm animals, by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, BBSRC and Sciencewise, challenges the notion that members of the public are incapable of contributing to complex policy and regulatory discussions
