More than pawns in the game of crop diversity conservation

There’s a program on the History Channel called Pawn Stars. It’s about a high-end but nevertheless slightly seedy family-owned pawn shop in Las Vegas, and the motley assortment of customers who come through its doors, hoping to trade their property for cash. I’ve developed something of an addiction to this show lately, and family and friends were sufficiently concerned to mount an intervention. Confronted with the truth, I had to think fast. I watch it for work reasons, I improvised. Pawn shops are just like genebanks.

Panicked or not, I may have been onto something. The wonderful thing about pawn shops is that they deal in all manner of weird and unusual stuff. Each item is brought in by someone who has some kind of story about it, needs to be evaluated by an expert, and will eventually catch the fancy of someone else. Just like genebanks. Genebanks typically keep seeds of dozens of different species, and sometimes hundreds if not thousands of different varieties of each. Each lot of seeds has a story – a story about how it got to be what it is, often thanks to generations of farmers –- encoded in its DNA. It was brought into the genebank by someone who more often than not has an interesting story to tell about how they got it. It needs to be taken care of in a particular way, depending on what it is, and its characteristics described. And it will be taken out by someone who needs it because of those characteristics, and will make good use of it, in a breeding programme, or because they remember their grandparents growing it.

Trying to explain what genebanks do can call forth many metaphors. All fall painfully short in some way. Banks only have money. Different currencies, maybe, and different kinds of accounts, but it’s all boring old money in the end. Only you have access to what you put into a safe deposit box. ((Which incidentally makes this the perfect metaphor for one of the world’s genebanks. Can you guess which one?)) Customers don’t take things into department stores. Museums do have lots of different things in them, but visitors can’t take them out. No genebank manager wants their charge to be described as just a museum. Some people call genebanks morgues, and while that may occasionally be a bit true, it’s just plain rude.

The parallel for pawn shops is better than all these, I think. But it’s not perfect. The idea of pawning the crown jewels, another metaphor that’s sometimes used for genebanks, at least within the CGIAR, is not, ahem, attractive. Anyway, genebanks don’t buy and sell; though maybe they should sometimes. And they deal in resources that are pretty special in being non-exclusive and renewable. Just because you’ve used a particular variety doesn’t mean nobody else can. And if the genebank is careful, it can always make more seeds.

Which in the end is why none of the comparisons is really satisfactory. A genebank is a genebank is a genebank. There’s no substitute for walking into a cold store full of thousands of jars of different varieties of seeds, neatly arranged on floor-to-ceiling shelving, carefully labelled. Or listening to the people in charge of some of the largest genebanks in the world explain their visions, as I’m doing this week. But if you want to see why some people get a thrill when they do that, can’t be in Rome this week, and can’t wait for Genebank Gods to come along on the History Channel, watch Pawn Stars. Just don’t let your family catch you.

10 Replies to “More than pawns in the game of crop diversity conservation”

  1. Luigi: But the Treaty is just about dead in the water – that is, not working. Whereas the CG genetic resource management is and has been working fine. Even the FAO Commission is working on `Plan B’ for access and benefit sharing over genetic resources (I had a `Plan B’ 12 years ago – Multilateral Access Bilateral Benefit-Sharing – MABBS – when I was arguing to the movers-and-shakers `If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’).
    The Treaty has not delivered the promised enhanced access to samples for the CGIAR, just the opposite. The CGIAR should walk away from the Treaty.
    On a lighter note, the Svalbard Seed Vault does seem to be broke and need fixing: during the recent FAO meeting on Svalbard no-one was allowed into the vault (some kind of safety problem?). The multiple images of the vault on the internet show massive operational problems. Obviously iced-up doors to the seed store: not in any of the seed stores I’ve designed. And there are the `now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t’ heat exchangers outside – in one photo hidden by a wall of blocks of snow.

  2. Dear Dr. Lugi
    Thank you for this subject, and you had been think fast,and watch it work ..
    You said” Pawn shops are just like genebanks”.
    Kindly ask, is this shop can help the high student if need the materials in their study? (Like genbank without fee or do free of charge..

  3. Luigi: The link is down. I can’t have been so successful so soon. I thought it would take ages to get people to see reason.

  4. Luigi: What seems to have happened is that over a few days the CGIAR genebank programme changed from a `research support programme’ to a full `research programme’ and was off-line while that happened. What is highly alarming is that the CEO of the CGIAR Consortium said at the Rome meeting last week: “We are very much interested in working with the Treaty as a system to get back to a situation where people feel confident that it’s in their interest to share, both internationally and among the members.” Note the `get back to’. As I said above, the Treaty is dead. If it is scrapped we just may be able to get back to a workable system. But `working with the Treaty’ will not help to repair the enormous damage the Treaty has done to the previous sharing of access to samples.

  5. @Luigi & or Jeremy, I’d be interested to hear your responses to the points raised here by Dave regarding the Treaty, as well as the MABBS he mentioned.

    @Dave, I’m puzzled why what you report re Svalbard vault is a “lighter note”, or is there an in-joke that I’m missing here?

  6. `between the lines’: The Treaty is the `heavy note’ that has done major damage – Svalbard was probably not necessary, as there is lots of spare capacity in genebanks all over the place for duplicate sample storage. But Svalbard has its moments. The unique North-facing but south-sloping 100m entrance ramp allows the midnight sun to shine down into the vault on Norway’s national day. That is such an in-joke that I seem to be the only person (presumably apart from the designer) that spotted it.

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