- Texan farmers have solved the problem of open sesame – with non-shattering varieties.
- They’re protected by patents, of course. No need then for handy dandy guidelines to access and benefit sharing in research projects.
- But you just know that ABS will be a hot topic when they round up the usual suspects for the International Symposium on Agrobiodiversity for Sustainable Development.
- As will the question of whether yields are becoming more or less sensitive to temperature.
- I wonder how quickly the proceedings of that shindig will become available. It took the 2nd International Symposium on Underutilised Species less than two years! Course, they’re still not open access …
- No free access to the IncrEdibles festival at Kew either. And why should there be?
- I’m willing to guarantee that cat-tail pollen will not be featured at Kew.
- Arepas, on the other hand…
Featured: GM for conservation
Luigi wondered why there was no back-up of a favoured banana in a global collection. Anne Vezina thinks there’s no need, and suggests that GM could conserve banana diversity.
Indian scientists are exploring GM to make hill bananas, which also have a GI designation, resistant to the bunchy top virus. For Fusarium, a neat system to make bananas resistant to the fungus is being developed in Australia.
In a previous post, you argued that GM bananas threaten crop diversity. Here’s one example how it would actually contribute to conserving a piece of diversity, especially given the difficulty of controlling Fusarium using management measures.
Ah, but would it be the same variety?
Nibbles: Goats, Tomato clones, Wheat breeding
- Rwandan women receive gift of goats. Now all they need is to get over the taboo on drinking goat milk.
- Immortal tomatoes. Oh no! They’re clones! Eeeeeek!
- Breeding heat-tolerant wheats. Wonder whether they’ll be doing it with doubled haploids.
Featured: Svalbard from the horse’s mouth
Cary Fowler clarifies matters:
Just to be clear, Svalbard does NOT impose SMTA requirements on countries that deposit. (Cases in point: the 69,000+ samples deposited by the U.S. and the 2,000+ deposited by the Seed Savers Exchange, an NGO.)
Treaty Parties and non-Parties alike are making use of the Seed Vault and use by non-Parties does not change the legal status of those deposits at all.
You can believe that if you want to.
Featured: Leafy greens
Jeanne Osnas is not content to rest on her leaf-eating laurels:
I would love to know more about the plant species composition of regional diets around the globe. It would be amazing to put this information into a “master greens tree,” so we can evaluate the relative contributions to the greens tree of cultural history of plant use and the organismal and evolutionary biology of the plants themselves.
There has to be a way to make this a crowd-sourced effort …