Agricultural Biotechnology in Africa

Addison, L., Gore, C., Bawa, S., & Schnurr, M.A. (2025). From negotiated to covert: married women’s agency in staple crop value chains in Kenya, Ghana, South Africa and Uganda. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 59(1), 91–112.

This article examines married women’s agency in marketing and income use for staple crops grown on jointly held fields in four African countries: cowpea in Ghana, maize in South Africa and Kenya, and matooke banana in Uganda. The article is based on a series of workshops in each country in which small-scale farmers participated in …

Fischer, K., Crossland-Marr, L., Mollaoglu, E. P., Ely, A., Glover, D., Schnurr, M., & Stone, G. D. (2025). Citizens as consumers: styles of reasoning about agricultural biotechnologies and publics. Science as Culture, 1–23.

In research and policy there is a dominant style of reasoning about the contribution agricultural biotechnologies can make to resolving major global challenges. In this reasoning, consumer scepticism is a major hindrance to deploying biotechnology and there is a significant focus on understanding consumer opinion in order to manipulate it. Analysing the historical role given …

Schnurr, M. A., Gore, C. D., Addison, L., Bawa, S., Taylor, A., Nsereko, H., & Mujabi-Mujuzi, S. (2024). The gendered value chain of matooke banana and its implications for tissue culture adoption in Uganda. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1–24.

Tissue culture banana is promoted as a form of micro-propagation that can aid farmers in managing pests and disease in Uganda, the country with the largest per capita consumption of banana in the world. But uptake amongst smallholder farmers remains low. This study recruited 71 farmers from five banana-growing districts in Uganda to assess how …

Rock, J., Schnurr, M.A., Kingiri, A., Ely, A., Glover, D., Stone, G.D., and Fischer, K. (2023). The knowledge politics of genome editing in Africa. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, 11 (1): 00143.

How is the promise of crop genome editing viewed by scientists working with or aspiring to work with the technology, by development experts seeking to mold public perceptions and policy attitudes toward genome editing, and by donors that provide funds for genome-editing research for agricultural applications in sub-Saharan Africa? In this article, we present data …

Rock, J., Schnurr, M.A., Kingiri, A., Glover, Stone, G.D., Ely, A., & Fischer, K. (2023). Beyond the Genome: Genetically Modified Crops in Africa and the Implications for Genome Editing. Development and Change.

Genome editing — a plant-breeding technology that facilitates the manipulation of genetic traits within living organisms — has captured the imagination of scholars and professionals working on agricultural development in Africa. Echoing the arrival of genetically modified (GM) crops decades ago, genome editing is being heralded as a technology with the potential to revolutionize breeding …