What IRRI’s DDG doesn’t mention in this video is that all those accessions (or many of them anyway) whose genomes are going to be painstakingly sequenced for the greater good of rice breeders everywhere are maintained, and have been for years, in the IRRI genebank. So I’m happy to say it for him. The international collections maintained by the CGIAR Centres are often called the crown jewels of the system. Cinderellas, more like.
And what you are not brave/smart/honest/ethical enough of that all theses races had been developed through thousands of years’ carefully selection, research, nurturing, cultivated, developed by the so called uneducated, fool, poor, undernourished, unaware of technologies, unhygienic farmers of the world.
May we add this to you Luigi please?
Zakir: I agree: but what to do about it? I spent several happy years collecting samples for the `international system’ and sometimes now regret it. Always I received the fullest kindness from farmers, freely giving me seed of their varieties. But the actual reward systems for farmers remain murky. `Farmers’ Rights’ is little more than an international slogan; farmers’ real ownership of their varieties seems subsumed in a UN `multilateral system’ that will never, by its nature, reward individual farmers, who remain true `Cinderellas’, not getting to the ball.
I saw perhaps the most effective farmer reward system in Orissa last week, visiting some of the poorest farmers in India who were growing IRRI varieties with submergence tolerance (the Sub 1 gene complex). While the farmers of origin of Sub 1 will probably never be identified and rewarded, the potential rewards to millions of farmers growing rice in flood-prone conditions are immense. And with the successful model of Sub 1 now more and more sources of submergence tolerance are being identified by IRRI’s and other scientists and incorporated in a wide range of existing and new varieties.
For the past 50 years this has been a great strength of the CGIAR crop institutes – to screen what farmers have developed, incorporate the benefits in public varieties and make them widely and freely available (depending, of course, on maintaining old varieties in the genebanks for future use).