Elizabeth Ransom

Gendering Agricultural Aid An Analysis of Whether International Development Assistance Targets Women and Gender

Gender-based inequalities constrain women’s ability to participate in efforts to enhance agricultural production and reduce poverty and food insecurity. To resolve this, development organizations have targeted women and more recently “mainstreamed” gender within their agricultural aid programs. Through an analysis of agricultural-related development aid, we examine whether funded agricultural projects have increasingly targeted women and/or gender. Our results show that the number of agricultural aid projects and the dollar amounts targeting women/gender increased between 1978 and 2003. However, the increase was modest and, as a percentage of all agricultural development aid, has declined since the late 1990s. Significantly, this decline occurs at a time when there are an increasing number of women engaged in agriculture. Our findings suggest that the rhetoric of gender mainstreaming outstrips efforts to develop projects aimed at women and gender inequality and that the concept may be being used to legitimize a decline in focusing explicitly on women.

The “All-American Meal”: Constructing Confidence in the Case of BSE

Using content analysis of newspaper coverage of the discovery of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in the United States, we analyze the medias portrayal of the “BSE crisis,” from a social constructionist perspective. We identify the salient claims-makers in the dialogue over food safety as it pertains to the discovery of BSE and we examine the content of their claims to reveal their core messages. We find that public definitions and responses to the disease are influenced by claims-makers and claims-making activities. Some actors construct claims of confidence to deny the severity of the disease, while others construct and disseminate claims of risk in the beef commodity chain, while still others diffuse claims of skepticism and uncertainty. These findings offer support for understanding claims-making as shaped by contextual forces. Claims are not made in a vacuum but are given meaning based upon biophysical and socio-cultural contexts.

New Agriculture Biotechnologies: The Struggle for Democratic Choice

In the contemporary global agrifood system, the emergence of a plethora of new agricultural biotechnologies has radically merged questions of design at the molecular level with those of agricultural change, posing a series of far-reaching social, technical, and ethical consequences and contradictions. With more possible technological paths than ever before, the new biotechnologies have made technology choice central in the discourse over the future of agriculture. Implicit in the making of such choices is a redesigning of nature that could profoundly transform the agrifood system, ecosystems, and the social organization of agriculture. Indeed, global food production and consumption currently stand on the brink of a radical alteration in organizational form which conceivably could surpass the redistributional outcomes of twentieth century industrialization of farming, agriculture, and the food system.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Elevating the conversation about GE crops

VOLUME 35 NUMBER 4 APRIL 2017 NATURE BIOTECHNOLOGY issues of most importance to the public as well as directly involved individuals and groups. The majority of our work involved carefully combing through the literature, focusing more on primary research studies than on reviews. Just for the three report chapters concerning currently commercialized GE crops, our report includes over 900 references. Once our committee developed a full draft of the report, it was sent to 26 reviewers with diverse expertise and perspectives (these reviewers were anonymous to the committee, until they were acknowledged in the final report). Each of the 918 comments and criticisms in the reviews had to be specifically addressed by the committee to the satisfaction of a US National Academies’ independent review board before the report could move forward for the Academies’ approval. Clearly, the report represented more than the opinions of the 20 committee members. Giddings and Miller’s statement that the report’s “unwillingness to overtly back GE crops, and the report’s efforts to give credence to alternative viewpoints —rather like the media’s obsession with giving two sides of an argument equal play, irrespective of which view is supported by the evidence” is, in effect, an uninformed indictment of the US National Academies’ process. Giddings and Miller also charge that we understate how much GE crops have contributed to yield increases, commenting that the report “muddies the debate about yields of GE crops compared with ‘conventionally’ bred crops, [and] gives undue credence and prominence to views backed by paltry peer-reviewed evidence.” In fact, our report carefully states, based on all evidence available to us, that when there was substantial pest pressure, insect-resistance traits did have higher yields compared with conventionally bred crops. However, we also report that many of the early studies purporting to show yield increases due to GE herbicide-resistance and insect-resistance traits were not designed rigorously. Furthermore, we point out that there is less evidence of herbicide-resistance traits increasing yield. So why were these GE Elevating the conversation about GE crops

Constructing Culinary Knowledge: Reading Rural Community Cookbooks

Abstract The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a period rife with social change for both the domains of food production and consumption, with significant consequences for how we know food today. Yet the ways in which culinary knowledge became standardized beyond cooking schools and commercial cookbooks remains largely undisclosed, particularly in rural households. Much of the existing cookbook literature relies on cookbooks that originate from urban locations. To explore how knowledge about food at the household and community level changed during this time, this article examines rural community cookbooks published in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan between 1893 and 1956. The findings suggest that contributors embraced the changing food landscape, as reflected in their enthusiastic adoption of processed products, but their culinary knowledge may have differed from that of their urban counterparts due to a lack of access to markets or affordable ingredients combined with continued reliance on local food environments.

The political economy of agriculture in Southern Africa

Agriculture remains the primary source of employment and income for most of the rural populations of Southern Africa (Hachigonta et al. 2013). When focusing on the political economy of agriculture and food in the region, Europe and European legislation have played a dominant role in both the past and the present. All the countries under discussion were impacted by colonial rule, and at present there is a significant disparity between commercial and smallholder agriculture. While the disparity is one of the consequences of colonialism and South African apartheid policies in the region, this disparity is exacerbated by current European Union (EU) trade policies. With future challenges related to climate change, combined with declining EU market access and struggles to better integrate smallholders into income generating activities, the Southern African region is in need of a new map with which to navigate towards a future that ensures a vibrant agricultural sector.