October updates

This is, I hope, the craziest month of my semester. Working on my NSF proposal, my prospectus, and putting together my committee (mission accomplished!). I am running to meet with my advisor in a few minutes, but I don't want to neglect this blog.

In the meantime, enjoy why don't you stop by Praj's blog to muse on some climate change science and policy goodness.

Two recent posts:

• Anti-science vs. epistemic closure in climate science denial

• Accepting climate science vs. climate policy

Related, my previous post on climate change communication and politics.

Or check out what's been up at my other group blog, Her Story of Science.

Genetically modified foods and public engagement

A great blog you should check out this weekend is Jack Stilgoe's "Responsible Innovation." My grad colleagues and I recently enjoyed discussing his "'How' technologies and 'Why' technologies." An excerpt:

Some emerging technologies are defined by how they do things. So called ‘platform-technologies’ or ‘enabling technologies’ like synthetic biology provide new ways of doing a whole lot of different stuff.... Geoengineering, on the other hand, is defined by its intentions (I wrote about this here). Its target is a future in which we are able to influence the climate. This doesn’t mean that geoengineering researchers desire this future. Many of them would despise such a prospect. But they are interested in it. So while nano and syn bio are defined by the how, geo is defined by its why. This invites different sorts of governance and difference sorts of public engagement.

But his recent post that really intrigued me was an interview with Stilgoe on engaging the public in dialogues about genetically modified (GM) foods. Stilgoe discusses how going into a public dialogue about GM foods is different than with a more politically-neutral, or less entrenched, topic (see my previous post on GM and risk; also see my post on public dialogues). He also talks about "upstream engagement," which means involving the public in science throughout the research process, rather than just dealing with the possible consequences of the results. On engaging with stakeholders:

[Q:] The report speaks of engagement with both stakeholders and the public. In the case of GM, what do you perceive to be the difference, and do we need a different approach for each? 

[Stilgoe:] Absolutely we need a different approach for each. When you are engaging upstream, everyone is a potential stakeholder; yet at the same time there are no obvious direct stakeholders because there isn’t anything yet for people to have a stake in, except researchers and the people who govern that research. In a downstream discussion like GM, there are clearly established stakeholders: farmers, regulators, politicians, interest groups, supermarkets, and animal feed companies who all need to find a way to thrash things out in a fairly old fashioned way. I think that confusing this activity with public engagement is unhelpful and puts far too large a burden on public engagement. 

I think there’s another important set of lessons that need to be learnt which we didn’t cover in the report, particularly about how to engage with stakeholders. These more controversial issues involve direct action, lobbying and engagement in ‘uninvited spaces’ that government is not controlling and is less comfortable with. With an issue such as GM, working out mechanisms for this form of engagement may be more important than convening a formal public dialogue.

Really interesting stuff to think about! Have a good weekend!

Defining my research question Part II

My big project of this semester is writing my prospectus, which is a full-length research proposal that I will later present and defend in front of my committee. I'm also working on my NSF GRFP proposal, which I got an honorable mention for last year and am really working on right now. So I'm working on the "big picture" prospectus, and then cramming it all into a 2-page (with detailed methodology, of course) research proposal for the NSF. Today I gave a presentation about my research, and was highly encouraged to look not only at public research organizations, but private as well. They looked at my figure (above) and asked the glaring question: where would a company like Monsanto be? I think we're onto something, so here goes...

Question 
How do crop varieties that are developed for short-term weather variability become promoted as a long-term climate adaptation strategy? What is the role of, and interaction between, international public and private research organizations in developing and promoting these varieties?

Motivating context
My research question revolves specifically around technological innovations in plant genetics, which are often promoted as a solution to climate change adaptation in agriculture. Drought-resistant, flood-tolerant, salt-tolerant, and heat-tolerant varieties can improve plant responses to weather variability, which is expected to increase under climate change. My research will examine how climate change is addressed in plant genetic research in the agricultural innovation system, and some of the farm-level implications of these technologies.

‘Agricultural innovation systems’ are typically viewed as the research pipeline from public international, to national, to local research and extension systems. The international research centers provide a centralized hub of knowledge production and, critically, innovations in plant genetics. Plant genetic improvement—such as “modern” (high-yielding) crop varieties, hybrids, and transgenics—has guided agricultural innovation systems over the past century. This concept has captured the imagination of scientists, policy-makers, and the public alike since the Green Revolution.

However, today’s agricultural innovation system is much more complex than the linear research pipeline. Farmers now participate in plant breeding research, and non-governmental organizations and private seed companies work in parallel with the public, Green Revolution-style research and extension infrastructure. Notably, the introduction of patents and intellectual property rights on genes and plant varieties frustrates the public-good-oriented public agricultural research, while providing an economic incentive for private agricultural research. The result is not a bifurcation of research goals, but rather a collaboration of public, private, and other agricultural organizations woven together in a “triple-helix” model of innovation, rather than the linear model. For example, this article shows the interactions between public and private research and funding:

Monsanto and BASF, for instance, are working with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and national agricultural research programs in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa to develop drought-tolerant corn. The program is supported by a $47 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In March this year, the African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that Monsanto and BASF have agreed to donate royalty-free drought-tolerant transgenes to the African researchers.

Innovation theory
The Hayami-Ruttan “Induced Innovation Hypothesis” seeks to explain how “supply” and “demand” factors influence the development of new agriculturally technologies. On the “supply” side is scientific agricultural research. On the “demand” side is farmers’ willingness to adopt new innovations. “Climate,” and other environmental forces, also affects the “demands” of agriculture, imposing new conditions that limit or provide opportunities for innovations. Can Hayami-Ruttan’s hypothesis provide insight into where we expect innovations to happen in the research pipeline, in light of the new organizational and institutional arrangements?

So what?
We imagine futures based on current technologies and past trajectories, thus certain innovations get “locked-in” and others “locked-out” of research and development. While climate is a relevant variable in the future of agriculture, it is not the only variable, especially in light of farmer livelihoods and the complexities of climate change adaptation and the overall resilience of agro-ecological systems. How does climate change influence farmers’ adoption of new crops, and facilitate or hamper longer-term climate adaptation strategies?


Further reading:
Parayil, G. (2003). Mapping technological trajectories of the Green Revolution and the Gene Revolution from modernization to globalization. Research Policy, 32, 971-990.

How the calorie shapes food politics, past and present

Despite feeling like I'm sinking into a puddle of quicksand as my work piles up this semester, there is one thing that always keeps me going: the excitement of reading about food and agricultural studies. I know this makes me the biggest nerd ever, but my dream job is for someone to pay me to write about whatever I want related to food and the environment. I might not be the next Michael Pollan, but I have a lot of academics and authors that I really look up to because of their work in this field.

One of my favorite authors that I discovered last year is Nick Cullather, a diplomatic historian. His most recent book, The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia, is a great read for anyone interested in foreign affairs, food politics, and the Cold War. The first chapter of this book is based on his previously published article, The Foreign Policy of the Calorie. It begins in the 1890s, in the beginning of the Progressive Era, with Wilbur O. Atwater and his invention of the calorimeter.

Cullather describes how the neutral technology of the calorimeter becomes a tool of foreign policy making, writing that, "With a numerical gauge, Americans could begin to imagine the influence to be gained by manipulating the diets of distant peoples. The calorie, Atwater declared, would determine the 'food supply of the future'" (Cullather, 2007, p. 341). Interestingly, Atwater worked for a time with Ellen Swallow Richards, who I wrote about earlier (much of her later life's work was in nutritional science).

The calorie became what we might call a "boundary object"- something at the interface of science and policy. It is used to co-produce both scientific knowledge and social order. Cullather shows how although the calorie is an extremely reductionist measure of health, it was used to define the post-world war foreign policy agendas. He writes: 

Beginning with India’s 1946 crisis, “famine” came to be understood as a national caloric deficit rather than the strictly localized emergency defined by imperial famine codes.... Caloric accounting reversed the flow of information about famine; international authorities decreed emergencies, while officials in stricken areas complied with mandated remedies. (Cullather, 2007, p. 362-363)

The invention of the calorie established a metric for modernization. Cullather shows "the capacity of science to renew positivism by inventing new metrics and new ways of deploying them. Quantitative reasoning was not a singular approach that could be disproved, but a succession of rhetorics tied to particular ways of counting. The inception of new numbering schemes revived a mandate for international social engineering" (2007, p. 364).

This obviously has a lot of links to later international development, including the Green Revolution and the population bomb. The complex ideas of food security and family networks were reduced to the simple metrics of calories, land area, and population size, and used to justify large-scale modernization interventions in developing countries. Today, I often think about how we have perhaps replaced the rhetoric around calories with the rhetoric of carbon. Instead of calorimeters we have climate models. Instead of a mismatch of calorie production and consumption, we have a mismatch of carbon emissions and climate impacts. What sort of inventions are we justifying through the normative lens of science and technology?

References:

Cravens, Hamilton, 1990. Establishing the Science of Nutrition at the USDA: Ellen Swallow Richards and Her Allies. Agricultural History 64(2):122-133.

Cullather, Nick, 2007. The Foreign Policy of the Calorie. The American Historical Review 112(2): 337-364.