Debate on the need for more fairness in academic research collaborations between actors in Africa (or the ‘Global South’, broadly) and counterparts in the Global North has intensified in recent years, while practice-oriented frameworks and efforts to foster more equitable partnerships have proliferated. Important approaches to recognise and undo asymmetries in concrete collaboration arrangements – division of labour, decision making, access to rewards, capacity building – have been identified.
In this provocation we draw on African and other postcolonial, decolonial and feminist scholarship, as well as systems thinking and global science data to argue that such ‘equitable partnerships’ efforts at best sidestep the urgent need for a much more profound rebalancing of the positioning of Africa and ‘Global North’ in the worldwide science and research ecosystem as a whole. We consider why such wider rebalancing is an imperative for both Africa and the global community, propose that research collaborations must be understood as a key entry point for advancing such a systemic shift, and suggest a necessary transformative collaboration mode to this end. We conclude by positing an urgent need to think and act beyond ‘equitable’ partnerships and highlight where responsibilities for action must lie.
This article contributes to debates on international collaborations by examining contradictions between the decolonial turn and the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund which imposed Global North leadership on Global South partners. Through the lenses of compromise and complicity, the article explores how collaborators strive to work together equitably within the constraints of a UK government Official Development Assistance funding scheme. Drawing on focus group discussions with members of a research team, the article traces, first, their engagement with political and institutional constraints and, second, their articulation of collaborative compromise and productive complicity. The article foregrounds the generative potential of complicity as a productive concept that can help partners to navigate the challenges of interdependence and partnership entailed in North–South, South–South, cross-sector and interdisciplinary collaboration.
The term polycrisis has recently gained much interest in academia and policy-making circles as a perspective to understand the nature of ‘overlapping emergencies’ – geopolitical, ecological, pandemics and economic – that are disrupting policy and politics in the Global North and South. How do we understand the nature of these new forms of crisis? This provocation argues that polycrisis, while a good descriptive term for the overlapping emergencies that characterise the current conjecture, should be analysed in terms of the larger crisis of capitalist social reproduction. The polycrisis needs to be understood as a political crisis that arises from a contradiction between social reproduction and the crisis of capital accumulation. It leads to increasing authoritarian statist forms as well as the growing resistance and dissent that is a feature of the broken politics of time and distinguishes the multiple intersecting crises of the 21st century.
This chapter traces the consolidation of power over the global seed-chemical complex by an elite group of ‘legacy’ life science corporations and the parallel privatisation of agricultural R&D. These developments reinforce the industrial agro-food system, reproducing its path-dependent techno-scientific trajectories and exacerbating the structural crises of rural economy and society. The ‘Big Four’ life science corporations have erected formidable barriers to entry using intellectual property rights platforms, which dominate the innovation process in agricultural biotechnology.
This political economy is explored over successive ‘generations’ of plant biotechnologies, beginning with their commercial introduction in the 1990s, the emergence of gene editing systems, notably CRISPR-Cas 9, after 2010, and concluding with the advent of gene driving. Gene drives radically extend the scope of molecular intervention from individual field crops and animal species to ‘engineering’ the agro-ecosystem, and potentially to global scales.
The chapter analyses the contrasting trajectories of the regulation and governance of biotechnology in the US and the EU, and argues that the US is an exemplary case of regulatory capture by industry.
This chapter analyses the rise of the alternative proteins (AP) industry, which is a vivid example of changing spatialities in modern food systems. Plant- and cell-based protein analogues threaten to displace the farmed livestock industry by compressing time and space and redefining the meaning of urban and rural. Later sections discuss the responses of Big Meat and Big Food corporations to these innovations and the formation of ‘protein conglomerates’.
AP start-ups have attracted massive funding from venture capitalists by using ‘promissory narratives’, which claim that meat substitutes can make a significant contribution to the mitigation of climate change and global hunger. These discursive claims are interrogated in the light of the recent performance of the plant-based sector, estimates of the infrastructural requirements needed to make even modest inroads into the global protein market, and recent critiques of arguments that prioritise a protein transition over a systemic sustainability transition.
A final discussion emphasises that the AP industry is intensely proprietorial, with the model of food-as-software secured by food-as-intellectual property.
This chapter examines how digitally mediated, platform-based technologies are reconfiguring food services, retailing, shopping practices, and foodways, and how certain earlier trends have been magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Big-box grocery firms have adapted well to the rise of online, contactless shopping, in contrast to the bleak experience of dine-in restaurants, which suffered initially from the extraordinary expansion of app-based home delivery platforms in 2020–2021.
The chapter explores the ‘winner-take-all’ dynamic of platform capitalism in the context of the vertical integration and global consolidation in the app-based food delivery sectors. This analysis looks at the flawed business model of these sectors and their reliance on ‘gig’ employment practices of casualisation, piece rates, and limited access to labour benefits. Recent attempts to re-classify these workers as employees rather than independent ‘contractors’ are reviewed, notably California’s Proposition 22 and the European Commission’s decision to issue draft regulations to treat ‘gig’ workers as employees.
This chapter recapitulates the main arguments and empirical findings, highlighting the striking continuity of the unsustainable industrial food system in an era of global warming and existential crises for humanity. The innovations analysed in this book, including PA, alternative proteins, gene editing, and home food delivery platforms, are easily accommodated in this hegemonic system. In short, the wave of innovation represents evolutionary rather than radical change.
The counterpart of this central continuity is the lack of progress towards a broadly-based sustainability transition.
This impasse is reflected in the deeply entrenched power structures that thwarted hopes of reaching a progressive compromise at the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit. This summit was an uninspiring prelude to the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP26), which generated a range of nonbinding commitments but few concrete measures to mitigate climate change.
A postscript briefly discusses the repercussions of the renewed Russia–Ukraine war on food security and health as food and fuel price inflation accelerate on a global scale, threatening international economic recession.
In this introduction, the recent wave of innovation in modern food systems driven by convergent digital and molecular technologies is set in the context of two existential crises facing humanity: global climate change and COVID-19.
The analytical approach taken in the book is then discussed, with emphasis on concepts drawn from neo-Schumpeterian evolutionary economics, science and technology studies, particularly actor-network theory, and inter-capitalist competition in an era of platform capitalism.
This section is followed by previews of the individual chapters in the book.
This book explores the socio-economic impacts, trajectories, and agro-food ‘futures’ arising from the intense wave of innovation sweeping the industrial food systems of the United States, European Union, and the United Kingdom against the background of global climate change and COVID-19 and its variants.
Chapter case studies include precision agriculture (PA) technologies, accompanying corporate farm support platforms and their repercussions on farmer identity and the politics of knowledge production, alternative plant- and cell-based proteins, gene editing agricultural biotechnologies, downstream home food delivery platforms, and the ‘gig’ economy.
Key arguments include: the convergence of digital and molecular technologies is galvanising techno-scientific change; innovation is path dependent, reinforcing hegemonic food systems, and their corporate architecture; this trajectory accordingly is marked by structural continuities and evolutionary rather than radical, revolutionary change; modern industrial food systems are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, yet there is scant evidence of a sustainability transition, even in a pre-figurative form; in 2022, opportunities were missed at the United Nations Food Systems Summit and COP26 to set modern food systems on a more sustainable path.
Analytical resources are drawn from evolutionary economics, actor-network theory, digital geography, and inter-capitalist competition in an era of platform capitalism.
