“Whose demand?” The co-construction of markets, demand and gender in development-oriented crop breeding

Abstract

Advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality in agriculture is a recognised development goal, also within crop breeding. Increasingly, breeding teams are expected to use ‘market-based’ approaches to design more ‘demand-led’ and ‘gender-responsive’ crop varieties. Based on an institutional ethnography that includes high-profile development-oriented breeding initiatives, we unpack these terms using perspectives from political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies. By conceptualising the market as an ongoing, relational performance made up of discourses, practices and human and nonhuman actors, we trace how the market is understood as an effective socioeconomic institution for soliciting demand, but also becomes a normative agenda. Construed as a demand variable, the relational and structural dimensions of gender are rendered less visible, which might strengthen rather than transform power relations’ status quo. On the other hand, a feminist science and technology perspective broadens the field of vision not only to the gendered dimensions of crop breeding, but also to the nonhuman actors, such as the crops and traits falling outside the market sphere of interest. By putting political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies into conversation, the article contributes to the development of a feminist political agronomy.

Development of portfolio management tools in crop breeding programs: a case study of cassava in sub-Saharan Africa

“…Transdisciplinary mapping stakeholders and their role and decision-making rights do not necessarily assure an inclusive non-disciplinary biased outcome. This is the reason why learnings from studies of power dynamics (Tarjem, 2023;Tarjem et al, 2023) related to the asymmetries between natural and social sciences that are rooted in different epistemological traditions and unequal funding will have to support effective implementation. Awareness must be raised through socialization and communication within the cassava community to acquaint stakeholders with the developed assets and provide them the opportunity to give their perspectives, which may be a source of innovation in the change and/or improvement process.…”

A case of transdisciplinarity and collaborative decision making: the co‐construction of Gendered Food Product Profiles

“…Thirdly, the need to interpret different types of data and forms of knowledge and the cross-disciplinary nature of the project poses risk of power asymmetries between disciplines that can influence resultswhere some perspectives and disciplines can be privileged over others. 17,39,40 For this reason, the GFPP guidance emphasises equity in decision-making processes through requirements such as each discipline to sign off on the final product, and the leadership of social scientists over the process, who can typically be sidelined and undervalued in interdisciplinary processes. 19,36 This process involvedand will need to go further in the futureaddressing potential trade-offs and making the decision-making process explicit.…”

“…Secondly, the complexity of the preferences of diverse food system actors (e.g., producers, processors, marketers, consumers) and the push from some breeding programmes to produce a homogenous set of traits for a population, can undermine potential ‘trade‐offs’ between characteristics that have different impacts for men, women, and other social segments. Thirdly, the need to interpret different types of data and forms of knowledge and the cross‐disciplinary nature of the project poses risk of power asymmetries between disciplines that can influence results – where some perspectives and disciplines can be privileged over others 17,39,40 . For this reason, the GFPP guidance emphasises equity in decision‐making processes through requirements such as each discipline to sign off on the final product, and the leadership of social scientists over the process, who can typically be sidelined and undervalued in interdisciplinary processes 19,36 .…”

Navigating toward resilient and inclusive seed systems

“…While initiatives may operate with different theories of change and normative ideas about agricultural development, there seems to be growing recognition of the need to become more demand-oriented. Tools are developed and deployed to make “product profiles” that can make breeding programs more gender-responsive ( 55 ). Promising results are coming out of the use of the citizen science “triadic comparisons of technologies” approach involving large numbers of farmers in the on-farm evaluation of sets of three varieties of a given crop species which, combined with use of digital tools, enables both local adaptation and a scale of reach not seen in earlier participatory plant breeding ( 56 – 58 ).…”