Geneflow 2009

This book explores the emergence and development of the legal concept of fair and equitable benefit-sharing, and its application in agriculture. Developed in the 1990s, the concept of fair and equitable benefit-sharing has been deployed in an ever-wider variety of international instruments, including those on biodiversity, climate change and human rights. A lack of clarity persists, however, on what fair and equitable benefit-sharing requires and entails, and whether its implementation supports or eventually undermines equity and justice. This book examines these questions in the area of land, food and agriculture, addressing for the first time several instances of the agricultural production chain, including research and development, land governance and land use and access to markets. It identifies challenges regarding implementation of the concept as enshrined in environmental treaties and soft-law instruments, with a focus on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, the Voluntary Guidelines on Tenure and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants. It investigates its role, enabling conditions and limitations, in a contradictory policy context involving environmental, food security and human rights objectives but also a growing web of multilateral and bilateral trade and investment agreements. Linking international law research with a socio-legal analysis, the book addresses four grassroots examples, which offer ideas for institutional and legal innovation from the local to the global level. This interdisciplinary title will be of great interest to students and scholars of international environmental law, agriculture, land law, development studies and global governance, as well as policymakers and practitioners working in these fields. “The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429198304, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license."

Gene flow is a natural process that occurs spontaneously and enables the evolution of life. However, with the release of genetically modified organisms, concerns have focused on introduced foreign transgenes and their dispersal in nature through gene flow. This book examines gene flow of transgenes, such as herbicide resistance genes, with the goal of understanding the factors that may affect the process of gene flow. A greater biological understanding is essential to make sound management regulatory decisions when also taking into consideration the processes that happen in conventional plants. Monitoring, modelling, and mitigation are the three most closely related elements of gene flow. The book includes both scientific reviews and perspectives on gene flow and experimental case studies, including studies of gene flow in soybean and poplar. The authors present diverse views and research methodologies to understand transgene flow.

In recent years, scientists have realized that evolution can occur on timescales much shorter than the 'long lapse of ages' emphasized by Darwin - in fact, evolutionary change is occurring all around us all the time. This work provides an authoritative and accessible introduction to eco-evolutionary dynamics, a cutting-edge new field that seeks to unify evolution and ecology into a common conceptual framework focusing on rapid and dynamic environmental and evolutionary change.

Recently, technological progress and the rise of DNA barcoding efforts have led to a significant increase in the availability of molecular datasets on intraspecific variability. Carcinologists and other organismal biologists, who want to use molecular tools to investigate patterns on the scale of populations, face a bewildering variety of genetic m

The Molecular Basis of Plant Genetic Diversity presents chapters revealing the magnitude of genetic variations existing in plant populations. Natural populations contain a considerable genetic variability which provides a genomic flexibility that can be used as a raw material for adaptation to changing environmental conditions. The analysis of genetic diversity provides information about allelic variation at a given locus. The increasing availability of PCR-based molecular markers allows the detailed analyses and evaluation of genetic diversity in plants and also, the detection of genes influencing economically important traits. The purpose of the book is to provide a glimpse into the dynamic process of genetic variation by presenting the thoughts of scientists who are engaged in the generation of new ideas and techniques employed for the assessment of genetic diversity, often from very different perspectives. The book should prove useful to students, researchers, and experts in the area of conservation biology, genetic diversity, and molecular biology.

The Human Sciences address problems in nature and society that often require coordinated approaches of several scientific disciplines and scholarly research, embracing the social and biological sciences, and history. When we wish, for example, to understand how some sub-populations and not others come to be vulnerable, why a disease spreads in one part of a population and not another, or which gene variants are transmitted across generations, then a remarkable range of disciplinary perspectives need to be brought together, from the study of institutional structures, cultural boundaries, and social networks down to the micro-biology of cellular pathways, and gene expression. The need to explain and address differential impacts of pressing contemporary issues like AIDS, ageing, social and economic inequalities, and environmental change, are well-known cases in point. Population concepts, models, and evidence lie at the core of approaches to all of these problems, if only because accurate differentiation and identification of groups, their structures, constituents, and relations between sub-populations, are necessary to specify their nature and extent. The study of population thus draws both on statistical methodologies of demography and population genetics and sustained observation of the ways in which populations and sub-populations are formed, maintained, or broken up in nature, in the laboratory, and in society. In an era in which research needs to operate on multiple levels, population thinking thus provides a common ground for communication and critical thought across disciplines. Population in the Human Sciences addresses the need for review and assessment of the framework of interdisciplinary population studies. Limitations to prevailing postwar paradigms like the Evolutionary Synthesis and Demographic Transition were becoming evident by the 1970s. Subsequent decades have witnessed an immense expansion of population modelling and related empirical inquiry, with new genetic developments that have reshaped evolutionary, population, and developmental biology. The rise of anthropological and historical demography, and social network analysis, are playing major roles in rethinking modern and earlier population history. More recently, the emergence of sub-disciplines like biodemography and evolutionary anthropology, and growing links between evolutionary and developmental biology, indicate a growing convergence of biological and social approaches to population.