Hi-Tech and/or/vs. Wide-Tech? Climate-Smart Agriculture, Nature-based Solutions, and Agroecology

Polson Institute for Global Development Seminar Series

The potential to harness new Hi-technologies such as Big Data, AI, robotics, gene editing, synthetic biology, etc. is obviously enormous. Yet, many social movements and civil society organizations see these technologies as unproven and potentially dangerous; regard the corporations controlling them as untrustworthy; and consider governmental and intergovernmental regulatory systems incompetent. Rather than High-Tech, many are proposing Wide Tech strategies working with agroecology and the hundreds of millions of food provisioners in their (field, forest and fish) labs around the world. Are these tech-strategies mutually exclusive? What would it take to find common ground?   

About the speaker:

Pat Mooney is the recently-retired executive director and co-founder of ETC Group – an international civil society organization established in 1977 to address agricultural, biodiversity and climate-related issues with a particular focus on the role of technologies and the impact of corporate concentration on global governance. He is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES – Food), an international ambassador for IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements) and on the board of other civil society organizations including the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) in the USA. He is a Canadian living in rural Québec and is the recipient of two honorary doctoral degrees as well as The Right Livelihood Award (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize) in the Swedish parliament in 1985; and the 1998 Pearson Peace Prize awarded by the Governor General of Canada. Pat Mooney is the author of a number of books and articles and co-author of six children and nine grandchildren.