- Legislation Introduced to Codify Stem Cell Rules
- Commissioner Enhances FDA’s Commitment to Personalized Medicine
- Perfecting Policy on Stem Cells
- NIH and FDA Aim to Retool Regulatory Science
- DOE Leads Federal Funding for a Regional Innovation Cluster
- Certainty on the Science of Climate Change
- They’re Not Perfect Cells, But They’re Model Cells
- Genomic Medicine on the March
- President’s Budget Aims to Recharge Regional Innovation
- Event: The Science of Climate Change
- Progress in Bioethics
- The Top Science Progress Features of 2009
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
Agriculture, Technology, and Environmental Impacts In Developing Countries
Three stories focusing on innovation and on the impact of climate change demonstrate the difficulty of fairly distributing the costs, risks, and benefits of technologies.
Nature reports that Monsanto and Syngenta have withdrawn their support for the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology. The $10 million project, which involves at least half a dozen transnational agencies including UNESCO and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, aims to produce quality forecasting of global social, environmental, and technological changes related to agriculture. The companies reportedly were disappointed that the International Assessment placed a high degree of emphasis on risks of agricultural biotechnology, rather than on its benefits.
Meanwhile, The World Bank (another institution involved in the IAASTD project) has released a new report, “Technology Diffusion in the Developing World” (pdf), which indicates rapid technological progress in the developing world, but also indicates a need for developing nations to become more receptive to foreign technology. Alan Gelb, chief economist at The World Bank, commented that “governments may need to intervene directly to encourage the rapid diffusion of technology and a domestic culture of ‘new-to-the-market’ innovation.” Presently, the report says, technical illiteracy and poor business climates stifle the “absorption” of new techniques and ideas (via SciDev.Net).
Finally, a new study led by ecological economist Richard Norgaard at the University of California, Berkeley reports that the world’s richest countries owe a debt of $1.8 trillion to developing nations due to environmental damages. “We know already that climate change is a huge injustice inflicted on the poor,” said Neil Adger at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, who was not involved in the research. “This paper is actually the first systematic quantification to produce a map of that ecological debt,” he said.
Image credit: flickr.com/moran
Comments on this article
