The UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science and Technology has today released its long-awaited report on ‘Advanced genetic techniques for crop improvement: regulation, risk and precaution’. The ESRC STEPS Centre…
GM report: Some nice recommendations, shame about the spin
Livelihood pathways after land reform in Zimbabwe
Understanding livelihood pathways requires sustained fieldwork in particular sites in order to understand what changes and why. Systematic longitudinal studies are sadly rare in many developing country settings. Project grants…
Sustainable intensification: a new buzzword to feed the world?
The term ‘sustainable intensification’ (SI) has entered academic and policy discourse in recent years, including in debates about what to do about agriculture in Zimbabwe. I have been intrigued for…
GM Crops: Continuing controversy
By Ian Scoones, STEPS Centre Director In 2002, the international press was full of headlines such as ‘Starving Zimbabwe Shuns GM Maize’. This was repeated again in 2010. The context…
Missing politics and food sovereignty
Over the last two decades La Via Campesina has grown as a movement campaigning for a change in the global agri-food system. Some claim that it is the world’s largest…
Food Sovereignty: a Critical Dialogue
On 24 January 2014, the event ‘Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue’ will bring together sceptics and advocates of food sovereignty to discuss the future of this controversial idea in critical…
Debating Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: new book by Ian Scoones
Zimbabwe’s land reform has been intensely controversial. Yet debate has been plagued by bias and misinformation. A new book by Ian Scoones, Debating Zimbabwe’s Land Reform, aims to offer a…
When global climate change politics meets African agriculture
by Joanes Atela, Political Ecologies of Carbon in Africa project As nations debate climate change this week at the 19th Conference of the Parties (COP19), addressing the urgent questions linking…
A new way of bringing ‘farms’ and ‘systems’ together
by Jim Sumberg, Stephen Whitfield and Ken Giller How do we understand farms as systems, and farms as part of systems? The terms and definitions that researchers use affect how…
Good & evil: two articles on closing down the debate on GM crops
Is it right to call opponents of GM crops ‘wicked’? In a recent interview, Owen Paterson denounced in starkly moralistic language people whom he sees as holding up progress on…