Speaking of breadfruit… Seeds are the … ahem … bread and butter of traditional genebanks: dry them, chill them, and they’ll keep for decades. But the seeds of many important crops don’t play nice. Some — including breadfruit — are recalcitrant, meaning they die if dried and frozen like well-behaved orthodox seeds. For these species, cryopreservation of the right plant part at really cold temperatures is the way to go. It’s the only realistic way to conserve their diversity safely, cheaply, and long-term. It means not relying on constantly refreshing field or laboratory collections that are vulnerable to pests, disease, climate, or simple human error. It’s a complicated subject technically, but if you need a quick introduction, or indeed a quick revision guide, you could do a lot worse that Dr Bart Panis‘ PowerPoint at the recent CGIAR Annual Genebanks Meeting. It’s 60-odd slides, but you can zip through them in 15 minutes and you’ll have the basics.
Guardian of a (nearly) forgotten staple honoured
The National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) awarded Dr. Diane Ragone, founder and director emerita of NTBG’s Breadfruit Institute 1, the 2024 David Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration. Dr. Ragone gave this presentation at the award ceremony, sharing her four-decade journey exploring, conserving, and promoting breadfruit.
Nibbles: Ukraine duplication, Mexican native maize, Andean agriculture double, Campanian crops double, Pacific cryobank, Moringa promotion
- A little more safety for Ukraine’s seeds, thanks to a new genebank.
- A little more safety for Mexico’s native maize, thanks to Pres. Sheinbaum.
- A little more safety for Andean agriculture, thanks to Ecuadorian Indigenous women and Inside Mater in Peru.
- A little more safety for Ischia’s zampognaro bean and Amalfi’s lemons, thanks to local people (and GIAHS).
- A little more safety for Pacific crops, thanks to cryopreservation. Breadfruit next?
- A little more safety for moringa? At least in Africa with all its “opportunity crops”?
Learn to save seeds online
Garden Organic in the UK is offering free seed-saving webinars in November, as part of their “Sowing your seeds” project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund:
- 4 Nov, 1-2pm: Getting started with seed saving
- 19 Nov, 6-7pm: Drying & storing seeds.
Sounds like fun.
An enhanced MLS (hopefully) beckons
The Multilateral System (MLS) of the Plant Treaty must deliver the fair and predictable monetary benefits it promised. If, that is, we want crop diversity to continue to be available with minimal friction to all who want to use it to help ensure the world’s food security.
That at least has been the premise of the past two years of negotiations by the Plant Treaty’s Ad Hoc Open-ended Working Group to Enhance the Functioning of the Multilateral System. With the 11th Session of the Governing Body coming up in November in Lima, Peru, the report of the Working Group is now up on the Plant Treaty’s website. 2
What does it say? Are we there yet?
Well, it’s not easy reading, but let me give you what I see as the key points. Summarizing such a dense and technical document in a few sentences is tricky, so I hope I don’t misrepresent anything. Please let me know if I have, and I will make any corrections needed.
Countries agree that a subscription model would generate more, and more predictable, user contributions than the current pay-per-use approach. There also seems to be a shared view that more crops should be brought under the MLS (beyond the ones currently listed in Annex 1), to reflect importance and interdependence. But also that countries should be allowed to carve out exemptions. And finally, there is general agreement that benefits derived from the use of Digital Sequence Information (DSI) must be addressed in the MLS framework. Somehow.
Still unclear, however, are the level, timing, and conditions of payments under the subscription model. And indeed debate continues over whether pay-per-use should remain available as an option, and under what terms. There are also different views on how DSI contributions could be embedded in the subscription system; and around how to amend Annex 1, whether to include all PGRFA or adopt a phased approach. The view of the seed sector was recently well summarized in Seed World. A predictably somewhat different view comes from Third World Network.
So, though there’s definitely been a lot of progress, without bold decisions and compromises in Lima (and thereafter), the reform package could still fall short of the needs of farmers and future generations. Fingers crossed.