- The Center for Plant Conservation has Best Plant Conservation Practices to Support Species Survival in the Wild. With online forum goodness.
- A little bit down-market, there’s What Are Seed Banks: A Complete Guide.
- How Do We Preserve the Vanishing Foods of the Earth? Good question, and nice article, but there’s surely more to the answer than what it says.
- Like indigenous people.
- And the Plant Treaty. Here’s two provocative briefing papers on that from the African Centre for Biodiversity in the run-up to the Governing Body meeting in November.
- Oh, and breeding. Even crowd-sourced breeding.
- Let the tequila industry show you what to do, in fact.
The Plant Treaty. Both these papers were written by Edward Hammond, once an associate of RAFI. He is the man that, after a heated exchange during the Leipzig 1996 conference, threatened to report me “to the NGOs”. Wow.
One paper – “Prudence versus Pressure at the Seed Treaty” (on digital sequence information) concludes that “…unbridled, run-away sequencing, hoarding and/or “open sourcing” of MLS DSI may so profoundly alter the access and use landscape for agricultural genetic resources that, from the perspective of industry, a decade from now there may be no benefit sharing value left in the MLS, and hence no reason to sign up for it.” So what has changed?
He then recommends that nothing should be changed in the Treaty until there is: “a full and proper set of provisions in relation to DSI in the revised SMTA.” In effect, the revision of the Treaty should be abandoned for ten more years of NGO-driven strife.
Given that the “NGOs” are directly responsible for the calamitous Treaty, mainly by overvaluing to the tune of billions of dollars the value of genetic resources taken from developing countries and supposedly patented, then why should anyone go on believing that these same NGOs are in any way acting to benefit developing countries.
And who is paying for all this lobbying?