Africa's food security in a broken global food system: what role for plant breeders’ rights?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The food security discourse has moved from the historic emphasis on increased food production and the eradication of hunger to a holistic and multidisciplinary outlook under the food system model. However, the importance of the legal dimensions of the food system discourse has yet to be fully felt or demonstrated within the diverse disciplinary and policy spaces for understanding the food security and food system interface. This article focuses on contemporary developments in Africa on plant breeders’ rights (PBRs) – an important aspect of law and policy on innovation over plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. It observes that the focus of recent legal developments on PBRs in Africa diverges from the centrality of smallholder farmers as the principal food and agricultural producers on the continent. Critically focusing on Africa's emergent policy reversal in favour of PBRs, the article underscores how legal developments are integral to fully understanding the dynamics of food security within a fractured global food system, especially as they relate to the African continent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".