Tech, Farming, Biodiversity
Digitalisation, genomics, climate geoengineering: A range of new and emerging technologies impact upon farming, food production and biodiversity. Many of them promise productivity growth and better sustainability, and even to address climate change by means of mitigation or increased resilience to it. However, small-scale farming communities often have neither access to – nor a say in the application of – these new technologies, some of which are high-risk, threatening potentially irreversible change to our planet.
In a series of essays and commentaries undertaken on the occasion of the Biodiversity Convention COP 2021-22 in Kunming, the ETC Group and others authors from the hbs network in Asia discuss technologies, the imagined futures that underpin them, and their actual and potential impacts on food production, farming communities and biodiversity, with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific region.
Organic Farming
Digitalisation and Agriculture
Food and Biotech
Podcast
Spanner in the System EP 1: Banana Drama
Together with Neth Daño, we learn about issues surrounding new technologies and their impacts on some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, and what we can do about them. We look at the global food system, how we care for – and sometimes don’t care for – our land, and what needs to be done to make a better world. This might all sound complicated, but we can start with bananas: believe it or not bananas can tell us a lot about how the world we live in works!
Tech Solutions for the Climate Crisis?
Podcast
Spanner in the System EP 2: Volcanic Disruptions
Find out what geoengineering is, why it's so dangerous, and why the idea of these largely non-existent technologies is being used as an alibi for the fossil fuel industry to continue extracting and polluting.