Meeting dietary health objectives through farming: A feminist review of biofortification and potential for genome editing in sub-Saharan Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Agri-food system responses to malnutrition aim to reach population-level impact with strategies such as biofortification. By increasing the nutrient content in crops through transgenics or conventional breeding, supporters of biofortification describe the technology as a cost-effective, scalable, and marketable strategy for addressing nutrition-related health challenges. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), governments of Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, supported by private foundations and bilateral development agencies, are taking the lead in researching the potential for genome-editing technologies that could develop and distribute biofortified crops more efficiently than other breeding techniques. While increasing production of nutrient-rich food is widely considered to be an effective strategy for addressing malnutrition, the gendered aspects of how biofortified crops are integrated into daily farming and food practices tends to be overlooked. This article argues that a broader framing of dietary health beyond nutrient uptake through feminist agroecology opens opportunities for responses that consider the socio-economic and environmental drivers of nutritional health challenges. This article reviews recent research on the gendered implications of biofortified crops in SSA to explore both the limitations in biofortified crop investments and possibilities for feminist responses to dietary health challenges and nutritional deficiencies in the region. It examines various framings of nutritional health in agri-food development that shape the design, financing, and implementation of global responses to malnutrition. Specific crop breeding and cultivation processes such as trait and crop selection, labor divisions at the farm level, and commercialization of food crops are examined through case studies. Three biofortified crops are reviewed—Quality Protein Maize in Ethiopia, biofortified banana in Uganda, and orange sweet potato in Tanzania—with an eye to considering the potential impacts of feminist agroecology on local food systems. In doing so, the article aims to apply lessons learned from biofortification to current genome-editing technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats-associated protein).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".