Abstracts, Papers &
Resources:
Science & Technology
We’ve scanned the web to bring together a library of interesting, thought-provoking articles, blogs, reports and academic papers that explore the issue of genetic engineering in food and farming from broader and deeper perspectives. Browse for inspiration or search by theme.
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The Gene Editing Business: Rent Extraction in the Biotech Industry
This article analyses the mechanisms governing the extraction, circulation, and distribution of rent in the biotech industry. Building on recent scholarship, it contributes to debates surrounding the importance of rent in technoscientific capitalism. It analyses genome editing as a global labour process. It interrogates how CRISPR technologies cement and expand neocolonial geographies of rent extraction, privatising the economic benefits and socialising the ecological risks. It argues that an increasingly monopolistic corporate biopower mediates how genome editing technologies are developed, and which mutant ecologies are socially produced.
Socio-economic assessment and genetically engineered crops in Africa: Building knowledge for development?
How could we know if agricultural development interventions make contributions to sustainable development goals (SDGs)? Genetically engineered (GE) crops are celebrated as a class of technological interventions that can realize multiple SDGs. But recent studies have revealed the gap between GE crop program goals and the approaches used to assess their impacts. Using four comprehensive reviews of GE crop socio-economic impacts, we identify common shortcomings across three themes: (a) scope, (b) approaches and (c) heterogeneity. We find that the evaluation sciences literature offers alternative assessment approaches that can enable evaluators to better assess impacts, and inform learning and decision-making. We recommend the use of methods that enable evaluations to look beyond the agronomic and productive effects of individual traits to understand wider socio-economic effects.
Predicted multispecies unintended effects from outdoor genome editing
Our aim was to assess potential activity in organisms that could be exposed to genome editing in uncontrolled environments. We developed three scenarios, using irrigation, fumigation and fertilization as delivery methods, based on outdoor uses in agriculture, namely pest and disease control. Using publicly available software , off-target effects were predicted in multiple species commonly found in the agroecosystem, including humans (16 of 38 (42 %) sampled). Metabolic enrichment analysis (gene IDs), by connecting off-target genes into a physiological network, predicted effects on the development of nervous and respiratory systems. Our findings emphasize the importance of exercising caution when considering the use of this genome editing in uncontrolled environments. Unintended genomic alterations may occur in unintended organisms, underscoring the significance of understanding potential hazards and implementing safety measures to protect human health and the environment.
Responsible development of digital livestock technologies for agricultural challenges
Digital livestock technologies (DLTs) are presented as solutions to grand challenges in post-Brexit British agricultural policy, such as climate change and food security. Evidence suggests technological solutions to agricultural challenges will be more effective with stakeholder and public engagement, yet there is little known about stakeholder views on these emerging technologies. We drew on responsible research and innovation, to analyse stakeholder perspectives on three case studies of DLT development through anticipatory focus groups with expert stakeholders in British animal agriculture. We found that stakeholders from broadly agroecological approaches to farming are at risk of exclusion from DLT development and policy, with negative implications for the ability of DLTs to resolve grand challenges in animal agriculture.
Democratization through precision technologies? Unveiling power, participation, and property rights in the agricultural bioeconomy
This piece addresses the political dimension of sustainability in the agricultural bioeconomy by focusing on power, participation, and property rights around key technologies. Bioeconomy policies aim to establish economic systems based on renewable resources such as plants and microorganisms to reduce dependence on fossil resources. To achieve this, they rely on economic growth and increased biomass production through high-tech innovations. This direction has sparked important critique of the environmental and social sustainability of such projects. However, little attention has been paid in the bioeconomy literature to the political dimension surrounding key precision technologies such as data-driven precision agriculture (PA) or precision breeding technologies using new genomic techniques (NGT). The political dimension includes questions of power, participation, and property rights regarding these technologies and the distribution of the benefits and burdens they generate. This lack of attention is particularly pertinent given the recurring and promising claims that precision technologies not only enhance environmental sustainability, but also contribute to the democratization of food and biomass production. This contribution addresses this claim in asking whether we can really speak of a democratization of the agricultural bioeconomy through these precision technologies. Drawing on (own) empirical research and historical evidence, it concludes that current patterns are neither driving nor indicative of a democratization. On the contrary, corporate control, unequal access, distribution, and property rights over data and patents point to few gains for small firms and breeders, but to a reproduction of farmers’ dependencies, and less transparency for consumers.
The societal roles and responsibilities of plant scientists in the context of genome-edited crops
Simulation of dual-purpose chicken breeding programs implementing gene editing
The paper considered the possibility of using gene editing to accelerate progress towards dual purpose chickens, thus eliminating the need for male culling. Our simulation demonstrated a general increase in genetic gain when genomic selection is used together with GE. The overall benefit of GE erased after some generations because the large-effect alleles became fixed. Hence, GE could be beneficial only when alleles with reasonable effect sizes are segregating and detectable. When the consumer preference and the price difference between the genome-edited chicken and the other chickens were to be considered, the findings from this study might not be sufficient to recommend the use of GE in breeding programs for quantitative traits.”
Remote Control and Peasant Intelligence – On Automating Decisions, Suppressing Knowledges and Transforming Ways of Knowing
Digital technologies are often touted as a silver bullet to respond to the interconnected crises of food, climate and biodiversity. Although they are presented by their promoters in governments and corporations as a necessary tool for innovation and for making food systems more efficient and sustainable, the reality is much more complex.
This report examines the implications of digital technologies taking hold in European agriculture. It focuses particularly on frictions between new digital technologies and peasant autonomy, agroecology and food sovereignty.
Technologies are not mute objects. Their development, distribution and use are inextricably linked to economic and political interests, cultural meanings, different types of knowledge as well as social and ecological relationships. In a context where money, technological know-how and power are highly concentrated in the hands of a few large companies and countries, the digitalization of food and agriculture is set to reinforce inequalities and discrimination.
Measuring agroecology: Introducing a methodological framework and a community of practice approach
. In this article, we report on a process of collaboratively developing a methodological framework, using the High Level Panel of Experts of the Committee on World Food Security 13 principles of agroecology as foundation. This framework overcomes some limitations of previous methodologies for evaluating degrees of agroecological integration (including those using Gliessman’s 5 levels of food system change) and facilitates a robust qualitative assessment of projects, programs, and project portfolios with respect to their “agroecologicalness.” The framework conceives of agroecology as paradigm-shifting rather than as incremental improvements to existing food systems. It enables global comparability as well as local contextualization of each principle. While the need for this framework arose from the desire to monitor—and increase—financial support for an urgently needed transformation toward agroecology, the framework can equally contribute to the design of projects and programs, which aim to radically transform food and farming systems. It also has value as an educational tool, in specifying through statements of value and concrete examples, what agroecological work aims at.