- There’s a millet festival in Chennai on 20 July. Any of our readers planning to go?
- “…the first ever, non-profit “eBay” of seed…” And you can contribute, if you like. With money, that is. I wonder if there will be a festival at some point.
- Fonio gets the Mail treatment (but no festival). Will it ever recover? Maybe this will help. For the record, it may have been the The Guardian that started this fonio frenzy. Anyway, here are the collections, if you think you’d like to contribute to the revolution. Like by organizing a festival. But why stop at fonio…
- Sometimes, however, exotic is better: like mango in Kenya. There’s plenty of mango festivals (and a new genebank too) in India, but not in Kenya, as far as I know.
- BBC radio programme on the history of barbed wire. Fascinating.
- Not to be outdone, DW on potato agrobiodiversity, including the CIP genebank. Wow, in Spanish too. Ah, but do any of them have high levels of B-9 vitamin? No? I know someone who can change that.
- More to Peruvian cuisine than potatoes, though. I feel a festival coming on.
- Food aid vs agriculture in Haiti. Nothing to celebrate there.
- Someone mention hard choices? Shea harvesting in Ghana presents a conundrum too.
- What can I tell you about Prosopis? Some are good, others not so much.
- I guess the same could be said for Solanums.
- Around the world in 20 food photos. No festivals? Well, I think Ramadan qualifies.
- “I have told you that NACGRAB would have been in a mess without the support of WAAPP.” Head of Nigerian genebank tells the world like it is.
- Coconut genebank managers tell each other like it is.
- Rice genebank makes an impression, visitor tells the world.
- I suppose we should have at least one Big Data thing, right? Make that two. But that’s all you get.
- Ok, then, one last one: diseases, genomics and, of course, football.
Re: “…the first ever, non-profit ‘eBay’ of seed…”
From Vandana Shiva.
From Kokopelli:
Special news from Kokopelli: AVAAZ, pull the veil away!
BEWARE: Kokopelli denounces AVAAZ’s fraudulent campaign concerning a so-called global “seed exchange”
Dear friends of Kokopelli,
A few days ago, the american organisation AVAAZ has launched a new fundraising campaign called “the best way to stop Monsanto”, widely circulated on Internet and by e-mail, and supposedly intended to create “the first ever, non-profit ‘eBay’ of seed”.
The association KOKOPELLI is absolutely NOT the initiator of that campaign and knows no French or European organisation participating in it.
Moreover, the e-mail promoting this campaign pretends that “a coalition of more than 20 groups and leaders in the field of sustainable agriculture like the Center for Food Safety and activist Vandana Shiva are standing by ready to launch the project.” We don’t know these groups, which are not designated, but we have contacted Vandana Shiva on this topic and here is what she answered: “I am not involved in this initiative, have never been contacted or consulted about it”!!! She has also expressed her indignation at the hijacking of her name and reputation on her SeedFreedom blog.
On this blog, the US organisation Center for Food Safety takes responsibility for these grotesque tactics and talks about “error” and “misunderstanding”, but we don’t believe a word of it all. What kind of error can it be when it is about launching a worldwide campaign, translated into 17 languages, in order to collect several hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions — because we have noted that the global amounts collected are carefully blanked out, but already more than 55,000 persons have donated?
We also note that the text presenting the campaign is very poorly drafted, that its terms are very evasive, that no Internet website exists for the project mentioned, that the partner “farmers” and “organisations” are not designated, that the potential suppliers and beneficiaries of seeds are not identified, that the proposed actions have no consideration for the regulatory constraints which undermine our action since 60 years etc.
All of that is not serious, and it seems therefore that this campaign is a complete sham of the organisation AVAAZ — of which we have already denounced the dubious character in the past (only in FR) — intended only to raise money at the expenses of generous but far too credulous web users.
We therefore ask for the immediate withdrawal of this campaign — or the exact and complete details of the project mentioned in it, if it exists — and full transparency on the use of collected sums, or complete refund to the deceived donors!
In any case, we recommend the utmost prudence concerning this campaign and, in general, concerning AVAAZ, and invite all of you to circulate this message to the largest possible number of recipients.
Kokopelli’s team – 16 July 2014
From The Ecologist, “Avaaz’s global ‘ebay of seeds’ — how did they get it so wrong?”
From: Reseau Semences Paysanne, “Is Avaaz combatting Monsanto or facilitating biopiracy?“
Why do they need funds for seed supply? There are hundreds of thousands of samples (and advice) available from hundreds of national and international seed stores for free. One of the useful bits of the ITPGRFA is to stop the multinationals patenting any of this. To pretend that farmers cannot continue to use public seed is deception.