Author: Jeremy Cherfas

[T]hose pathways of change favoured by the least powerful are typically the most excluded.

In agricultural research, as in many other areas of science, there is often a tension between different points of view. Most strident, perhaps, and one that we generally avoid, are the slanging matches over GMOs. But there are others that do concern us: participatory or “scientific” breeding; private or public seed supply systems; ex-situ or in-situ conservation; monocropping or multicropping; benefit-sharing, what and with whom? You can think of others. I’m not going to attempt to resolve any of those. I am, instead, going to point to a very recent paper: Opening Up the Politics of Knowledge and Power in Bioscience. Andy Stirling, at the University of Sussex in England, looks at different ways in which the discussions are approached determines so much more than just the “answers” obtained. I’m not even going to attempt to give a gloss. Instead, I’ll just highlight a few passages that resonated with me, and hope that they stimulate discussion.

[I]n deciding which innovations to pursue in agriculture (technological or social), it cannot be assumed that any one aim is paramount—whether the issue is respecting the cultural attributes of food, maximizing world protein production, commercial revenues in supply chains, combating climate change, or sustaining hard-pressed livelihoods. All are valid concerns, but not all can be maximized together. Although participation may improve mutual understanding and appreciation among stakeholders, even the most inclusive or co-operative practices cannot definitively reconcile underlying contrasting interests.

It can be difficult for those wed to probabilitistic approaches, to accept the distinction between risk and uncertainty. … These challenges of ambiguity differ from uncertainty, because they apply even after outcomes have already occurred. For example, much of the controversy over genetically modified organisms concerns not the likelihood of some agreed form of harm, but fundamentally different understandings of what harm actually means (e.g., in terms of threats variously to human health, ecological integrity, agronomic diversity, indigenous food cultures, sustainable rural livelihoods, vulnerability to climate change, control of intellectual property, or global industrial distribution).

[I]n a globalising world, the stakes are further raised by corporate concentration and pressures for harmonization and standardization (as championed by the World Trade Organization). For instance, though alternative trajectories are biologically feasible in agricultural seed production — and potentially economically viable and socially realizable — incentive structures for large corporations in global markets favour strategies that assert intellectual property (IP) or otherwise maximize profits in a supply chain. This helps explain the conventional industrial emphasis on hybrid varieties and preference for IP-intensive transgenics. Other technical approaches may also be relatively neglected for narrow commercial reasons, like forms of cisgenics (using similar techniques within species and varieties) or apomixis (allowing greater farmer selection using asexual reproduction) or marker-assisted methods (augmenting conventional breeding with advanced genetics). Equally knowledge-intensive social and institutional innovations are even more disadvantaged—especially those emphasising the interests of marginal groups (like participatory breeding, noncommercial extension practices, or microfinanced indigenous production). In these ways, momentum along particular innovation pathways is driven more by political economy than scientific inevitability. These path-dependent choices are not just about “sound science” and technical optimization, but the exercise of political power.

Good, thoughtful way to start the year, and I hope you won’t think me too lazy for just cutting and pasting, but there didn’t seem to be any value in anything else.