by Saurabh Arora (SPRU/STEPS Centre), Barbara van Dyck (SPRU/STEPS Centre), Alejandro Argumedo (Asociación ANDES) and Tom Wakeford (ETC Group) Last week, we attended the annual CRISPRcon hosted by Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. The conference was marketed as a not-for-profit event offering ‘a unique forum in which a broad selection of diverse voices…
Choreographed Consensus: The stifling of dissent at CRISPRcon 2019
What is revolutionary about the Green Revolution?
The dramatic increase in yields of wheat and rice in the 1960s and 1970s in India, along with many other countries in the post-colonial world, was framed as a technological breakthrough made possible by miracle hybrid seed varieties. This breakthrough ostensibly averted mass scale hunger and was central, so the story goes, to realising substantive…
Disciplinary identities and other barriers to advancing interdisciplinary working
By Professor Linda Waldman, Institute of Development Studies, Professor Joanne Sharp, University of Glasgow, and Professor James Wood, University of Cambridge. The following blog was first published on the PLoS ONE blog ‘EveryONE’. Interdisciplinary research is becoming increasingly commonplace. In recent years, climate change, ecosystem sustainability, planetary boundaries and zoonotic disease outbreaks have in particular…
Why radical land reform is needed in the UK
Half of the land is owned by 1% of the people. Getting information on who owns what land is nigh on impossible. Tax arrangements favour land speculation. Ordinary people cannot get access to land to grow food. Where is this place? Not a settler country in southern Africa, but the UK. With the publication of…