285 19. Responsible innovation and agricultural sustainability: lessons from genetically modified crops Phil Macnaghten INTRODUCTION Agricultural sustainability (alongside what is commonly referred to as food security) is one of the global grand challenges for the twenty-first century. With rising world population, persistent hunger and a growing demand for food globally, accompanied by the need to protect land for biodiversity and ecosystem services, and the mounting threats associated with climate change, it is unsurprising that agricultural sustainability is fast becoming one of this century’s most critical challenges for global policymaking. Yet it remains unclear what innovations in the agricultural sciences are required and how best they are to be pursued. On the one hand, as neatly characterised in a 2009 report from the UK’s Royal Society, there is the policy discourse arguing for the ‘sustainable intensification of global agriculture’ (Royal Society 2009, p. 1). Arguing from within a global productivist perspec- tive, the challenge is presented as the largely technical one of how to meet this century’s demand for food, feed, fibre and fuel on an area of land that is unlikely to increase in the future but with a global population that will rise significantly at least until the mid- twenty-first century. Within this broad frame, novel science and technology are presented as having a primary role to play in meeting these challenges. Without radical advances, particularly at the molecular level, it is hard to imagine, at least within this epistemic framework, how yields can be increased without adverse environmental impact or the cultivation of new land. Novel research methods have, the argument goes, the potential to contribute to food production through forms of genetic improvement, including the genetic modification of crops that have been altered to introduce new and desirable traits. 1 Nevertheless, it is clear that a number of promising innovations in the agricultural sciences, principally those shaped by the technological paradigm of molecular biology, have met with considerable social and political resistance. The introduction of transgenic genetically modified (GM) crops, in particular, has been deeply mired in controversy, polemic and, in some cases, opposition. Although the rise of GM crops has been dramatic in recent years, their uptake has not been the smooth nor universal transition predicted by its advocates. Controversy has been marked even in those countries where approvals have been impressively rapid. All too commonly, the regulation of GM crops has been challenged as inadequate, even biased, and in some settings such as Brazil (Guivant and Macnaghten 2015), India (Egorova et al. 2015) and Mexico (Carro-Ripalda et al. 2015), the planting of certain GM crops has been legally suspended. Unless we better understand why the governance of GM crops continues to evade policy resolution, attempts aimed at the genetic improvement of crops risk generating further controversy, misunderstanding and polemic. For this reason, GM crops represent a valuable case to examine whether M4749-VON SCHOMBERG_9781784718855_t.indd 285 22/05/2019 14:33