OMGMO: Original Multi-modal Dataset of Genetically Modified Organisms in African Agriculture

Daniel Grzenda, Trevor Spreadbury, Joeva Rock, Brian Dowd-Uribe, David Uminsky

Abstract: Genetically modified (GM) crops can be a tool to address food security, climate change, and environmental sustainability in Africa. However, despite nearly three decades of developing GM crops for explicit use on the African continent, very little is known about this research, and very few crop varieties have moved from development to use by farmers. This paper introduces a collection of three multi-modal datasets to provide insight into the social, political, and economic actors shaping the future of GM crop development in Africa. Our interdisciplinary team compiled a dataset of GM crops in the research development pipeline, a collection of financial disclosures of funders supporting GM crop research, and a collection of over 2 million articles on agriculture and GM crop reporting from African media. We demonstrate the effectiveness of combining these pertinent datasets to aid in social science analysis of the social, political, and economic landscape of agricultural biotechnology in Africa.

External IDs:dblp:conf/socinfo/GrzendaSRDU22