Conventional ex-ante evaluations rely on a mix of economic, environmental, and social indicators to assess the potential impacts of Genetically Modified (GM) crops prior to their commercial release. While these predictive studies have produced useful knowledge, they have also consistently overestimated the ex-post outcomes of GM crops for African smallholder farmers. Yet these same assessment methods remain the dominant approach to project farmer outcomes for a new suite of soon-to-be commercialized GM staple crops. The research presented in this paper offers a different evaluative approach for these new GM crops by taking inspiration from farming systems research (FSR). We use the conceptual starting point of FSR scholarship—the farming system—to conduct an exploratory predictive analysis of three GM crops currently in the experimental pipeline: Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) in Kenya, disease-resistant matooke banana in Uganda, and Bt cowpea in Burkina Faso. Our findings suggest that the lofty projected benefits of these crops are unlikely to be realized by many, if not most, smallholder farmers due to incongruences with the farming systems they are designed to benefit. This research demonstrates the importance of using farming system-based evaluation methods to better anticipate likely farm-level outcomes of new breeding technologies.

传统的事前评估依靠经济、环境和社会指标的组合来评估转基因 (GM) 作物在商业发布之前的潜在影响。虽然这些预测性研究产生了有用的知识，但它们也一直高估了转基因作物对非洲小农户的事后结果。然而，这些相同的评估方法仍然是为即将商业化的新转基因主粮作物预测农民成果的主要方法。本文介绍的研究从农业系统研究 (FSR) 中汲取灵感，为这些新的转基因作物提供了一种不同的评估方法。我们使用 FSR 奖学金的概念起点——农业系统——对目前处于试验管道中的三种转基因作物进行了探索性预测分析：肯尼亚的非洲节水玉米 (WEMA)、乌干达的抗病马图克香蕉和布基纳法索的 Bt 豇豆。我们的研究结果表明，由于与旨在使他们受益的农业系统不一致，许多（如果不是大多数）小农不太可能实现这些作物的崇高预期收益。这项研究证明了使用基于农业系统的评估方法来更好地预测新育种技术可能在农场层面产生的结果的重要性。