Communication is essential to making biotechnology and genomics relevant to developing countries and poor people. Few would disagree with that. But many are sceptical about public relations efforts to impose inappropriate technological ‘solutions’ on developing countries. This paper is a partial reflection on how PR and advocacy ‘mixes’ can be understood and whether they can be useful to innovation in developing country contexts.

Agricultural biotechnology and, specifically, the development of genetically modified (GM) crops have been controversial for several reasons, including concerns that the technology poses potential negative environmental or health effects, that the technology would lead to the (further) corporatization of agriculture, and that it is simply unethical to manipulate life in the laboratory. GM crops have been part of the agricultural landscape for more than 15 years and have now been adopted on more than 170 million hectares (ha) in both developed countries (48%) and developing countries (52%).

African farming systems are highly heterogeneous: between agroecological and socioeconomic environments, in the wide variability in farmers’ resource endowments and in farm management. This means that single solutions (or ‘silver bullets’) for improving farm productivity do not exist. Yet to date few approaches to understand constraints and explore options for change have tackled the bewildering complexity of African farming systems. In this paper we describe the Nutrient Use in Animal and Cropping systems – Efficiencies and Scales (NUANCES) framework.