- Trees are good for African farmers.
- A basic universal income for people in biodiversity hotspots. Agrobiodiversity hotspots too?
- Coconut History 101.
- 30 years of bananas in Belgium.
- Eat up all your fiddleheads.
- Hybrid wheat is coming at last.
- Ed Buckler wins big. Unclear if he’ll be allowed to tweet about it.
- Nonsense piece on the ITPGRFA.
ITPGRFA: Bit of a `curate’s egg’ article. It says:”The Seed Treaty was motivated by fear of “biopiracy””. More to the point, the reason the Treaty is not working now is the fear of biopiracy in developing countries. The CG and developed countries just get on with sample distribution, but these sample distributors have never expected to be paid for sending out samples. Developing countries (and FAO) certainly did expect to be paid and were not, an expectation resulting from the vast raising of expectations by NGO `biopiracy’ activism. But then, NGOs – not being scientists – did not have a clue about the value (to us all) of crop introduction. The people who funded all the activism still have a lot to answer for. Things could get worse. The `New America’ we have now could stop sending out samples or even charge for access, or stop the CG sending samples to designated `axis of evil’ countries.
Just after I left my job at CIAT as head of genetic resources I was sitting in an NGO meeting in London listening to a prominent South American NGO person inventing facts and complaining that CIAT had prevented Nicaragua getting bean samples (he didn’t know who I was). It was actually the USDA that would not comply – Nicaragua was a `bad’ country. I did, of course, disabuse the said NGO person (they are very prone to this `alternative fact’ kind of thing) telling the meeting that I had had a photo of Sandino on my office pin-board, loved Nicaragua, and a red and black kerchief in my desk drawer and (in those days, but not any more) could send samples to whoever I wanted to.