From food prices and hunger to GM crops and biosafety, debates about agricultural innovation involve many competing narratives about key science and technology problems and their potential solutions. With each…
Pathways to sustainable food futures in a dynamic world
Living with Materiality or Confronting Asian Diversity? The Case of Iron-Biofortified Rice Research in the Philippines
This article draws on findings from a multi-sited study of international science policy processes in rice biofortification. It focuses on the ten-year period between the discovery of a “high-iron” elite…
The politics of global assessments: the case of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD)
The IAASTD – the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development – which ran between 2003 and 2008, involving over 400 scientists worldwide, was an ambitious attempt…
Opening up the GM crop debate
Debates about transgenic (genetically-modified) crops have become highly polarised across the globe. In the process, civil society organisations and social movements have played an important role in debates on agricultural…
Problemas de la regulación en semillas. El caso del algodón transgénico en el Chaco
Este artículo discute las regulaciones sobre algodón transgénico desde el punto de vista de las prácticas y las necesidades de los agricultores de menor tamaño de la provincia de Chaco,…
Regulatory harmonization and agricultural biotechnology in Argentina and China: Critical assessment of state-centered and decentered approaches
The international harmonization of technology-related regulations seeks certain norms across diverse contexts. Harmonization efforts are based primarily on the promulgation of state-centered command and control forms of regulation, though they…
Is international agricultural research a global public good? The case of rice biofortification
The status of international agricultural research as a global public good (GPG) has been widely accepted since the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. While the term was not…
Orphans or Siblings? Opportunities and Constraints in Alternative Dryland Staple Crops (maize briefing 5)
Sorghum, millet, cowpea, pigeon pea and green grams: these resilient plants once dominated smallholder farms in the drought-prone regions of Eastern Kenya. But in the last 50 years these ‘orphan…
Maize Security does not equal Food Security? Breaking the ‘Lock in’ to the Dominant Maize Pathway (maize briefing 4)
Maize is central to household food security for most Kenyans. As a result, policies that affect maize directly influence most Kenyan families’ access to food. Moreover, ‘maize politics’ is played…
The STEPS Pathways Approach (maize briefing 2)
The term ‘pathways’, in the STEPS project, is used to refer to the particular directions in which interacting social, technological and environmental systems co-evolve over time. A ‘pathways’ approach recognises…