The interview with Piero Bevilacqua touches on a broad range of subjects: From the use of pesticides to the “Green Revolution”; from GMOs to biodynamic and biological agriculture, and the respect of biodiversity; from modern farming’s wasteful use of water to Common Agricultural Policy with its nonsustainable exploitation of farmland.
The essay focuses on the scientific approaches emerging from WW II that attempted to identify key risks to food security and to highlight how wartime experiences informed notions of food security within international organizations for many decades to come.
The Haber Process is a chemical process that converts ammonia into nitrogen and oxygen gas. Nitrogen is an extremely potent fertilizer, and prior to its chemical mass production, was only available in bird and bat feces. The invention of this process and its large-scale use starting in 1913 revolutionized agriculture around the world.
Using Northern Ghana as a case study, this paper questions the usefulness of regional data for understanding food insecurity, and shows that the supposedly novel ideas of the present in fact have a strong colonial lineage.
The multinational, agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto developed the first widely used genetically modified crop with the introduction of the “Roundup Ready” soybean.
In this paper we analyse scientists’ perspectives on the release of genetically modified (GM) crops into the environment, and the relationship between their perspectives and the context that they work within.
A grippingly perceptive tale of changing social attitudes and scientific practices.
Using case studies from Austria and Kansas, this paper compares the socioecological structures of the agricultural communities immigrants left to those that they found and created on the other side of the Atlantic.
