Development expert Glenn Davis Stone has written a book, The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World, which questions everything we think we know about the current state of agriculture and how to, or perhaps more importantly how not to, feed a world with a growing population. This book is about the three fundamental forms of agriculture: Malthusian (expansion), industrialisation (external-input-dependent), and intensification (labour-based). The best way to understand the three agricultures, and how we tend to get it wrong, is to consider what drives their growth. The book provides a thoughtful, critical analysis that upends entrenched misconceptions such as that we are running out of land for food production and that our only hope is the development of new agricultural technologies. The book contains engaging and enlightening vignettes and short histories, with case studies drawn from across the globe to bring to life this important debate and dilemma. The book concludes by arguing there is a viable alternative to industrial agriculture which will allow us to meet the world's needs and it ponders why such alternatives have been downplayed, obscured, or hidden from view. Routledge

 

 

Chelsea Green has commissioned a “timely polemic challenging the move to factory-produced food and why we must protect our right to farm”. Muna Reyal, head of editorial, acquired world rights, all languages, to Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future by Chris Smaje directly from the author. The book will launch at Groundswell, the UK’s biggest regenerative agriculture festival, and will be published on 29 June. Smaje was inspired to respond to recent publications such as George Monbiot’s Regenesis, which advocates for a factory-produced food system and a radical move away from farming altogether. Challenging this vision, Smaje writes that we must put the power back into the hands of small-scale farmers, producers and the local communities that support them. The Bookseller

 

 

­­­­­In recent months ChatGPT and other AI chatbots with abilities to respond to prompts with human-like writing have unleashed angst from different quarters of society: chatbots could help students cheat, encroach on jobs, or mass produce disinformation. Researchers in the life sciences have also been rolling out artificial intelligence-driven technology, but to less fanfare. That’s concerning, because new algorithms for protein design, while potentially advancing the ability to fight disease, may also create significant opportunities for misuse. As biotech production processes are evolving to make it easier for creators to make the synthetic DNA and other products they’ve designed, new AI models will allow researchers to conceive of a far greater range of molecules and proteins than ever. Nature took millions of years to design proteins, but AI can generate meaningful protein sequences in seconds. While there are good reasons to develop AI technology for biological design, there are also risks to such efforts that scientists in the field don’t appear to have weighed. AI could be used to design new bioweapons or toxins that can’t be detected. Protein toxin-based weapons have long been a concern. These are poisons created by organisms, like plants or fungi. Ricin, for example, a toxin made from castor beans, was likely used by Bulgarian agents in London in 1978 in the umbrella assassination of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident. [GMW: We are reliably informed that students are already using AI chatbots to cheat in their assignments.] Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

 

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