- What kind of goods are plant genetic resources for food and agriculture? Towards the identification and development of a new global commons. Exclude non-Parties to the ITPGRFA from access, and get all Parties to make up-front financial contributions are the recommendations that most grabbed my eye.
- Genome-Wide Association Studies Using Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Markers Developed by Re-Sequencing of the Genomes of Cultivated Tomato. Markers for important agronomic traits identified. Now to use the little buggers.
- Low temperature storage of mango (Mangifera indica L.) pollen. Good to know for these recalcitrant things.
- Cryopreservation of grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) in vitro shoot tips. Another triumph for droplet-vitrification.
- Evaluation of Morphological Traits Diversity in Synthetic Hexaploid Wheat. But is it novel?
- Wild Lactuca species, their genetic diversity, resistance to diseases and pests, and exploitation in lettuce breeding. It is novel, but can be difficult to use.
- Homegardens as a distinct agro-ecological entity in Kerala: Its biodiversity, structural dynamics and environmental significance. They are becoming more and more important as refuges for biodiversity, but need policy support.
- Probable Agricultural Biodiversity Heritage Sites in India: XVII. The South-Central Region of Eastern Ghats. And not a homegarden to be seen.
- Genetic diversity and relationship of cattle populations of East India: distinguishing lesser known cattle populations and established breeds based on STR markers. Just because it’s not officially recognized as such, it doesn’t mean it’s not a breed.
- Reproductive ecology and genetic variability in natural populations of the wild potato, Solanum kurtzianum. Sexual reproduction, insect pollinator behaviour and seed dispersal by storm water channels make for more diversity within than between populations, and more besides.
- Genomics of Compositae crops: Reference transcriptome assemblies, and evidence of hybridization with wild relatives. Self-incompatibility and post-zygotic isolation makes for crops that are generally more different from their wild relatives.
- Consequences for diversity when animals are prioritized for conservation of the whole genome or of one specific allele. Basically, you can’t do both.
Mike Halewood’s paper on a new global commons for PGRFA looks at the ITPGRFA through the `lens of recent commons scholarship’ and finds problems. It is a serious attempt to address these problems but there was no need of any `recent scholarship’ to flag problems. From a background of coal-face genetic resource management and collecting I started 15 years ago to tell everyone and his/her dog that the nascent Treaty was a mess and would be a quicksand. I even toyed with the idea that the Treaty was designed (as opposed to destined) to fail – so that all those happy small farmers doing their own seed production and `evolving’ indigenous crops to perfect `local adaptation’ could be protected from improved varieties and exotic crops (worth thinking about).
The Treaty could never succeed in the light of the decades long `biopiracy’ campaign. Countries think that their varieties were stolen, patented by multinational and then sold back to their farmers – only very marginally true and almost lost in the vast benefits of access to free varieties from international plant breeding and spill-overs from developed country plant breeding and, most of all, the importance of introduced crops.
The new Director of the GCDT has been telling Brazil that, for staple foods, it is 90% dependent on crop introduction: this is the right approach – continue to access germplasm from elsewhere or starve (or, for South America – threaten your vast exports of introduced crops such as wheat and soybean shipped to Asia).
There is lots more in Mike’s paper to approve and also critique but his conclusion that samples should be denied to non-members of the Treaty is not possible for the CGIAR to implement.
Finally – could we have everything produced by Bioversity on policy to be open access. I am not about to pay Routledge to get something I need to make a case for scrapping the Treaty and moving to the mutual benefits of crop introduction – worth many, many billions of dollars – not least because most exported crops come from countries to which they had been previously introduced.
Well said, Dave, although I try to be less cynical about the Treaty.