Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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An open letter to Kofi Annan

Dear Mr Annan

Congratulations on your appointment as Chair of the Board of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. In your inaugural lecture in Capetown you said categorically that the Alliance would “work with farmers using traditional seeds known to them”. I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “traditional seeds,” especially in view of Agra’s strong focus on breeding: “we will develop improved varieties for the full range of Africa’s important staple food crops,” it says on the Agra web site.

Maybe you just mean “not genetically engineered”. That might make sense, because the sentence before the one on “traditional seeds” reads: “We in the Alliance will not incorporate GMOs in our programmes.”

Continue reading “An open letter to Kofi Annan”

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Tomato tastefest

I used to do this:

Sometimes there seems to be a disconnect between the luxury consumption of diversity and the fundamental use of biodiversity for food security; I’d love to help show people at farmers’ markets, for example, that their taste treat is someone else’s survival mechanism.

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Seed Regulation: How much is enough?

Earlier this year we posted about how EU Regulations destroy agricultural biodiversity and proposed rules to allow the marketing of European traditional varieties. Eliseu Bettencourt, a colleague with a close interest, said then that he didn’t have enough time to intervene in the discussion. Now, he says, he has a chance. Which would be kind of dull except that he’s seen the very latest drafts of the documents …

The post of 19th February 2007 refers to the “Draft Commission Directive establishing the specific conditions under which seed and propagating material of agricultural and vegetable species may be marketed in relation to the conservation in situ and the sustainable use of plant genetic resources through growing and marketing”, supposedly due to come into force on 1st April 2007. The Directive did indeed materialize as the writer of the post so rightly guessed then, though he even refrained from the obvious joke.

I guess the writer was referring to the draft document of May 2006, which bore that title. According to the drafts I have had access to later, in February 2007, that document was sub-divided intro three different documents, respectively: Continue reading “Seed Regulation: How much is enough?”