Patterns of Political Support and Pathways to Final Impact
Calestous Juma et al.
What the paper says
To summarize and conclude this special issue of AgBioForum it will be useful first to present the lessons learned so far in the form of a scheme for predicting which biofortified food technologies will enjoy the greatest political support or opposition, and from which actors on the political landscape. The approach here is necessarily hypothetical, given that most of the biofortified food technologies currently under scientific development have yet to be released into any commercial marketplace. After offering this summary projection of likely political responses, this final section then examines the likely consequences in terms of actual nutritional impact. Predicting Patterns of Political Support Drawing on country-by-country and crop-by-crop analysis, a crude method may be derived for predicting how much political support any particular novel food crop is likely to enjoy in the developing world. The other sections of this special issue have shown that conventionally developed food crops enjoy more support than GMO food crops, and that food crops enhanced with both nutrient and agronomic traits enjoy more support than those with only one of these or with one at the expense of the other. Also, support for these technologies varies across institutions within society, with scientists usually in favor but with others basing their decisions on the food crop traits (agronomic versus nutrient) and the method of breeding (GMO or not). Table 1 summarizes these various generalizations. Each row in this table presents a different mix of food crop traits and breeding methods. Each column considers the reaction to the technology of a different community of institutions within society. The plus signs indicate probable political support, the minus signs indicate probable opposition, and the zeros represent the likelihood of political indifference. The far right-hand column adds up the net political support each technology will be expected to receive. If all of the different communities supported the technology it would have a
1 citation
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06 |
| M · momentum | 0.20 × 0.15 = 0.03 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.