In this article I use the concept of the Plantationocene to discuss contrasting contemporary narratives and practices-namely agroecology versus sustainable intensification. Drawing on long-term ...research in Malawi, I use the concepts of the plantation imaginary as well as the plot to consider the potential for decolonializing agrarian futures in Africa. I argue that sustainable intensification narratives are a type of plantation imaginary that mobilizes images and ideas of African agrarian knowledge as backward, and African women farmers overburdened, to be saved by modern technology and science. Feminist agroecology can be viewed as a form of plot that allows for new ways of farming and being in communities that is a kind of decolonial thinking.
This paper argues that large-scale land appropriation is displacing subsistence farmers and reworking agrarian social relations in northern Ghana. The recent wave of farmland enclosure has not only ...resulted in heightened land scarcity, but also fostered a marked social differentiation within farming communities. The dominant form of inequality is an evolving class of landless and near-landless farmers. The majority of households cope with such dynamics by deepening their own self-exploitation in the production process. The fulcrum of this self-exploitation is gendered property rights as part of the conjugal contract, with men exerting a far greater monopoly over land resources than had previously been the case. Due to acute land shortages, women's rights to use land as wives, mothers and daughters are becoming insecure, as their vegetable plots are being reclassified as male-controlled household fields. The paper further documents the painful choices that landless farmers have to make in order to meet livelihood needs, including highly disciplined, yet low-waged, farm labor work and sharecropping contracts. In these livelihood pathways, there emerge, again, exploitative relations of production, whereby surplus is expropriated from land-dispossessed migrant laborers and concentrated with farm owners. These dynamics produce a 'simple reproduction squeeze' for the land-dispossessed. Overall, the paper contributes to the emerging land grabbing literature by showing geographically specific processes of change for large-scale mining operations and gendered differentiated impacts.
Food systems, which are complex, including everything from production, processing, distribution, consumption, and waste, and involve many different groups and institutions, are under increasing ...pressure to adapt to climate change. Maladaptation, which has been increasingly observed and documented in the scientific literature, is defined as an action that 1) generates or increases climate risk, 2) exacerbates vulnerability, 3) erodes sustainable development, or 4) contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Maladaptive actions can occur to those implementing the action, or transfer negative effects on those not considered by the actual intervention, including at the global scale. In this paper, I review the current literature on maladaptation in food systems, provide examples from the literature of different types of maladaptive outcomes in food systems, and the literature on how to prevent maladaptation.
•Increasing evidence of maladaptation in agriculture and food systems.•Agricultural intensification strategies often have maladaptive impacts.•Adverse environmental, social, political, health, and well-being impacts.•To avoid maladaptation, consider different scales, timeframes, and trade-offs .•Planning processes that address power inequities important to prevent maladaptation.
This article reviews the structures and biological activities of several classes of uridine-containing nucleoside antibiotics (tunicamycins, mureidomycins/pacidamycins/sansanmycins, ...liposidomycins/caprazamycins, muraymycins, capuramycins) that target translocase MraY on the peptidoglycan biosynthetic pathway. In particular, recent advances in structure-function studies, and recent X-ray crystal structures of translocase MraY complexed with muraymycin D2 and tunicamycin are described. The inhibition of other phospho-nucleotide transferase enzymes related to MraY by nucleoside antibiotics and analogues is also reviewed.
There are urgent calls for the transformation of agriculture and food systems to address human and planetary health issues. Nutrition-sensitive agriculture and agroecology promise interconnected ...solutions to these challenges, but evidence of their impact has been limited.
In a cluster-randomized trial (NCT02761876), we examined whether a nutrition-sensitive agroecology intervention in rural Tanzania could improve children's dietary diversity. Secondary outcomes were food insecurity and child anthropometry. We also posited that such an intervention would improve sustainable agricultural practices (e.g., agrobiodiversity, intercropping), women's empowerment (e.g., participation in decision making, time use), and women's well-being (e.g., dietary diversity, depression).
Food-insecure smallholder farmers with children aged <1 y from 20 villages in Singida, Tanzania, were invited to participate. Villages were paired and publicly randomized; control villages received the intervention after 2 y. One man and 1 woman “mentor farmer” were elected from each intervention village to lead their peers in agroecological learning on topics including legume intensification, nutrition, and women's empowerment. Impact was estimated using longitudinal difference-in-differences fixed-effects regression analyses.
A total of 591 households (intervention: n = 296; control: n = 295) were enrolled; 90.0% were retained to study end. After 2 growing seasons, the intervention improved children's dietary diversity score by 0.57 food groups (out of 7; P < 0.01), and the percentage of children achieving minimum dietary diversity (≥4 food groups) increased by 9.9 percentage points during the postharvest season. The intervention significantly reduced household food insecurity but had no significant impact on child anthropometry. The intervention also improved a range of sustainable agriculture, women's empowerment, and women's well-being outcomes.
The magnitude of the intervention's impacts was similar to or larger than that of other nutrition-sensitive interventions that provided more substantial inputs but were not agroecologically focused. These data suggest the untapped potential for nutrition-sensitive agroecological approaches to achieve human health while promoting sustainable agricultural practices.
Improved markers of prognosis are needed to stratify patients with early-stage colorectal cancer to refine selection of adjuvant therapy. The aim of the present study was to develop a biomarker of ...patient outcome after primary colorectal cancer resection by directly analysing scanned conventional haematoxylin and eosin stained sections using deep learning.
More than 12 000 000 image tiles from patients with a distinctly good or poor disease outcome from four cohorts were used to train a total of ten convolutional neural networks, purpose-built for classifying supersized heterogeneous images. A prognostic biomarker integrating the ten networks was determined using patients with a non-distinct outcome. The marker was tested on 920 patients with slides prepared in the UK, and then independently validated according to a predefined protocol in 1122 patients treated with single-agent capecitabine using slides prepared in Norway. All cohorts included only patients with resectable tumours, and a formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tumour tissue block available for analysis. The primary outcome was cancer-specific survival.
828 patients from four cohorts had a distinct outcome and were used as a training cohort to obtain clear ground truth. 1645 patients had a non-distinct outcome and were used for tuning. The biomarker provided a hazard ratio for poor versus good prognosis of 3·84 (95% CI 2·72–5·43; p<0·0001) in the primary analysis of the validation cohort, and 3·04 (2·07–4·47; p<0·0001) after adjusting for established prognostic markers significant in univariable analyses of the same cohort, which were pN stage, pT stage, lymphatic invasion, and venous vascular invasion.
A clinically useful prognostic marker was developed using deep learning allied to digital scanning of conventional haematoxylin and eosin stained tumour tissue sections. The assay has been extensively evaluated in large, independent patient populations, correlates with and outperforms established molecular and morphological prognostic markers, and gives consistent results across tumour and nodal stage. The biomarker stratified stage II and III patients into sufficiently distinct prognostic groups that potentially could be used to guide selection of adjuvant treatment by avoiding therapy in very low risk groups and identifying patients who would benefit from more intensive treatment regimes.
The Research Council of Norway.
Climate change research is at an impasse. The transformation of economies and everyday practices is more urgent, and yet appears ever more daunting as attempts at behaviour change, regulations, and ...global agreements confront material and social-political infrastructures that support the status quo. Effective action requires new ways of conceptualizing society, climate and environment and yet current research struggles to break free of established categories. In response, this contribution revisits important insights from the social sciences and humanities on the co-production of political economies, cultures, societies and biophysical relations and shows the possibilities for ontological pluralism to open up for new imaginations. Its intention is to help generate a different framing of socionatural change that goes beyond the current science-policy-behavioural change pathway. It puts forward several moments of inadvertent concealment in contemporary debates that stem directly from the way issues are framed and imagined in contemporary discourses. By placing values, normative commitments, and experiential and plural ways of knowing from around the world at the centre of climate knowledge, we confront climate change with contested politics and the everyday foundations of action rather than just data.
This Malawi study examines whether agroecology can be effectively used by smallholders to address food sovereignty. We build on the concept of the metabolic rift, arguing that repairing this rift ...includes social relations. Agroecological methods can be important strategies, but are labour and knowledge intensive, and require addressing power dynamics within and beyond households in order to address food sovereignty. The case study included participatory methods of dialogue, experimentation and horizontal learning to foster change. We argue that feminist concepts of intersectionality and participatory praxis are central to mobilizing agroecology to build food sovereignty and work to transform social relations.
Summary Background Antiangiogenic agents have established efficacy in the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer. We investigated whether bevacizumab could improve disease-free survival in the ...adjuvant setting after resection of the primary tumour. Methods For the open-label, randomised, controlled QUASAR 2 trial, which was done at 170 hospitals in seven countries, we recruited patients aged 18 years or older with WHO performance status scores of 0 or 1 who had undergone potentially curative surgery for histologically proven stage III or high-risk stage II colorectal cancer. Patients were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive eight 3-week cycles of oral capecitabine alone (1250 mg/m2 twice daily for 14 days followed by a break for 7 days) or the same regimen of oral capecitabine plus 16 cycles of 7·5 mg/kg bevacizumab by intravenous infusion over 90 min on day 1 of each cycle. Randomisation was done by a computer-generated schedule with use of minimisation with a random element stratified by age, disease stage, tumour site, and country. The study was open label and no-one was masked to treatment assignment. The primary endpoint was 3-year disease-free survival, assessed in the intention-to-treat population. Toxic effects were assessed in patients who received at least one dose of randomised treatment. This trial is registered with the ISRCTN registry, number ISRCTN45133151. Findings Between April 25, 2005, and Oct 12, 2010, 1952 eligible patients were enrolled, of whom 1941 had assessable data (968 in the capecitabine alone group and 973 in the capecitabine and bevacizumab group). Median follow-up was 4·92 years (IQR 4·00–5·16). Disease-free survival at 3 years did not differ between the groups (75·4%, 95% CI 72·5–78·0 in the capecitabine and bevacizumab group vs 78·4%, 75·7–80·9 in the capecitabine alone group; hazard ratio 1·06, 95% CI 0·89–1·25, p=0·54). The most common grade 3–4 adverse events were hand–foot syndrome (201 21% of 963 in the capecitabine alone group vs 257 27% of 959 in the capecitabine and bevacizumab group) and diarrhoea (102 11% vs 104 11%), and, with the addition of bevacizumab, expected increases were recorded in all-grade hypertension (320 33% vs 75 8%), proteinuria (197 21% vs 49 5%), and wound healing problems (30 3% vs 17 2%). 571 serious adverse events were reported (221 with capecitabine alone and 350 with capecitabine and bevacizumab). Most of these were gastrointestinal (n=245) or cardiovascular (n=169). 23 deaths within 6 months of randomisation were classified as being related to treatment, eight in the capecitabine alone group and 15 in the capecitabine and bevacizumab group. Interpretation The addition of bevacizumab to capecitabine in the adjuvant setting for colorectal cancer yielded no benefit in the treatment of an unselected population and should not be used. Funding Roche.
Celecoxib for Stage III Colon Cancer Kerr, David J; Chamberlain, Sarah; Kerr, Rachel S
JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association,
04/2021, Letnik:
325, Številka:
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Journal Article
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