- Kenneth John Frey, oat breeder and more besides, has died.
- A food forager discovers the importance of the proper names for plants.
What’s eating India?
Resources Research undertook a labour of love to produce this graph. It shows, for 20 Indian states, roughly how much of pulses and cereals each tenth of the population eats each month. I urge you to go and read the full post for the details.
Bottom line: Of the 200 populations, 43 are “severely deficient” in cereals and pulses required per month.
The graph is based on data from national surveys of “Consumer Expenditure,” so I don’t know whether it includes food people grow rather than buy, but I doubt that makes much difference overall.
Makanaka makes lots of interesting points about the data, comparing the 2009-2010 survey with a similar one done five years before. Overall, this is a terrific example of open data allowing people to offer alternative interpretations to the standard line.
Nibbles: DIY entomophagy, Svalbard movie, Perennial crops, IPM
- Grow your own delicious bugs for snacks. I feel duty bound to point out that the snacks in question are flies, not bugs. And where’s my donut?
- This short film about the Svalbard seed vault is not nearly as scary as it’s poster image.
- FAO hosts an expert workshop on perennial crops, for three days in August.
- The ENDURE network – “diversifying crop protection” – says Danish farmers love Integrated Pest Management. And the Endure network.
Nibbles: Baobab, Courses, Social Media, “Exotic” edibles, Cereals on display, Ithyphallic lettuce, Ancient manure, Entomophagy, SRI, Weed evolution
Quick catch-up after 10 days away edition. If I missed anything spectacularly important, it’s bound to resurface.
- A baobab (not the baobab) in danger of extinction.
- Could it be saved by attending a course on Contemporary Approaches to Genetic Resources Conservation and Use?
- And if it’s courses you’re interested in, we have:
- Agriculture nutrition linkages, also from Wageningen.
- Agroecology – the Future of Farming?, from the College of Enlightened Agriculture at Schumacher College. Why the weaselly question-mark?
- And a conference on domestication.
- The value and use of social media as communication tool in the plant sciences deconstructed by AOBBlog.
- AOBBlog also gives the “cunning culinarists” at Kew some stick on their 100 exotic edibles.
- Personally, I’d quite like to try Dead Man’s Fingers.
- And take a look at Kew’s new display of summer cereals.
- I don’t see any mention, however, of lettuce as a sacred sex symbol, with added vocabulary-enhancing properties.
- And speaking of manure, its use is almost as old as agriculture.
- If I had a donut for every why-don’t-we-all-eat-insects article I’ve read, I’d be spectacularly overweight by now.
- Big Picture Agriculture offers An Interview with Cornell’s Dr Erika Styger about the System of Crop Intensification (SRI-Rice).
- Is watergrass (Echinochloa) a problem for SRI-Rice? I don’t know, but it supports Ford Denison’s argument about the speed of evolution in weeds …
- … prompted by Carl Zimmer’s article on weeds in the New York Times.
Could plant diversity become free (as in speech)?
I’ve been tremendously privileged to be at the Seed Savers Exchange 33rd Annual Campout and Conference in Decorah, Iowa. It’s a wonderful gathering of people interested in saving and sharing seeds, with all sorts of workshops, practical classes, and speakers. One of this year’s speakers was Jack Kloppenburg, of the University of Wisconsin. Kloppenburg wrote First the Seed (now available in a second edition), which is the best analysis of the economic nexus that surrounds seeds and plant breeding. He told the audience he was “here to share an idea, just like you guys share seeds.” So I’m sharing his idea: the Open Source Seed Initiative.
Kloppenburg set out his ideas in a 2010 paper in the Journal of Agrarian Change. In it, he rejects what he calls the “accomodationist” approach to patents and other efforts to restrict access to plant genetic resources. Accomodationists, he says, seek “market mechanisms for compensating those from whom germplasm is being collected”. Instead, he proposes a more radical approach derived directly from the open source software movement. The Open Source Seed Initiative prevents the privatisation of plant genetic resources and, in Kloppenburg’s view, also “might actually facilitate the repossession of ‘seed sovereignty’”.
Open source software is accompanied by a licence that encourages people to share it and create new programs with it, and at the same time prevents anyone from releasing a program that uses the code under any other form of licence. The creativity embedded in the code cannot be privatised. Kloppenburg and a group of like-minded seed companies, plant breeders and academics want to apply similar licences to plant genetic resources.
Kloppenburg is at pains to point out that actually he has nothing against plant patents, other intellectual property rights, contractual “bag-tags” or any of the other mechanisms that commercial breeders use to enforce ownership of their products.
“The problem isn’t the tool,” he told the conference. “The problem is who is using the tool and why.”
There have been three meetings so far to discuss the Open Source Seed Initiative, and although the details have yet to be worked out the underlying concept is simple. An OSSI licence allows me to give you seed (or any other form of plant genetic resources) with only one condition: that you have to share it, and anything you create with it, with exactly the same condition attached.
“It becomes viral,” Kloppenburg explained. “Now ‘viral’ is kind of problematical for people in agriculture,” he conceded, “but it is. It propagates.” As it does so, it creates a protected commons, as opposed to an open commons, of things that can be freely shared but not privatised. That is OSSI’s great potential strength, according to Kloppenburg.
“People who will share are unrestricted. People who won’t share aren’t interested.”
The general idea of a protected commons for plant genetic resources bubbles up from time to time, Kloppenburg told the audience, citing Richard Jefferson’s CAMBIA initiative as one manifestation. He credits the germ of OSSI to Tom Michaels, a bean breeder then at the University of Guelph in Canada, who in 1999 proposed the idea of a general public licence for plant germplasm, or GPLPG.
Kloppenburg stressed that the lack of a monopoly does not mean a lack of payments. As with open source software, there are many ways in which plant breeders and others can seek payment for their services. There could be different forms of OSSI licence, allowing royalty payments to the breeder on the first transfer. And seed companies would be free to charge for OSSI-protected varieties.
Many details remain to be worked out. Who will police the licences, and how? Will it be possible to discover traits shared under OSSI and then incorporated into privatised varieties? How could that be proved? And the global plant genetic resources community has yet to start a serious discussion of the idea. That may prove a hard sell after the long struggle to obtain the current International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which Kloppenburg doesn’t think is working.
The really radical route to establishing a just and agronomically productive regime for managing flows of crop germplasm is not to arrange payment for access to genetic resources, but to create a mechanism for germplasm exchange that allows sharing among those who will reciprocally share, but excludes those who will not.
The current material transfer agreement that accompanies plant germplasm under the International Treaty has some elements of an open source licence about it – but could go much further. Is there any chance CGIAR genebanks, whose holdings constitute the bulk of germplasm available under the International Treaty, could actually lead the way to the just and productive regime that OSSI is looking for, or are they too beholden to the private sector?