ETHICAL ARCHETYPES FOR TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION IN FOOD SYSTEMS

The project will develop an analysis of contrasting and sometimes incompatible priorities for technological innovations in agriculture and food systems. This analysis will stress overarching rationales, purposes and normative interpretations of social functions performed by food and fiber production, and the integration of production practices into the larger system of socio-economic transactions. It will facillitate reflection and articulation of reasons for undertaking or supporting a specific trajectory or plan of innovation.A secondary objective is to encourage a public dialog on innovations that will more satisfactorily expose the reasons and purposes for innovation that are assumed or imagined by innovators, as well as reasons that others may have for resisting or attempting to subvert a given course of innovation. The background for this objection is the lack of a fruitful public debate over the use of recombinant methods for altering the genomes of agricultural plants and animals during the first era of genetic engineering (roughly 1997-2007).The third objective is to discover how this analysis might be deployed in public settings by conducting workshops with two key stakeholder groups: farm producers and urban residents, especially those who face ongoing challenges to food security.