The article argues that the dominant assumptions in UK agricultural research need to be challenged, opening it up to a wide range of voices and disciplines.

This article has been published in the special edition magazine - For whom? Questioning the food and farming research agenda (follow link to access the full magazine and a fully referenced version of the article).

As Rio+20 approaches, we are publishing two new articles on corporations: Calling the corporations to account is a short history of why corporate power was not tackled at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, even though many people went to Rio with the purpose of limiting it. It is written to stimulate efforts to make Rio+20 the place where we finally begin the international process to control corporate power. Corporations are not human, so why should they have human rights? explains how corporations came to have human rights, and asks whether this is desirable, and what we might do about it. Who’s in Charge? Through these articles, we also want to highlight a previous piece of work. This is a short history of the development of the modern corporation and corporate personhood in the UK, written by Daniel Bennett at the request of Helena Paul, for the Programme on Corporations, Law and Democracy.

On 14 January 2011, Science published an article by Lyall et al. entitled 'Suppression of Avian Influenza Transmission in Genetically Modified Chickens'. The authors state themselves that their research and results are about a 'proof of principle' - something which by definition is a long way away from actual applicability and does not consider any safety issues. The ‘proof-of-principle’ claimed is “that genetic modification can be used to prevent avian influenza infection in chickens”.