Category: Featured

Jeremy rides his hobby horses in his comment on my recent ride on my own:

Good point, that improved varieties always depend on existing diversity yet those doing the improving seldom contribute to maintaining the diversity they depend on.

I would add a couple of my hobby horses.

Will ordinary Zimbabweans be able to afford these “fresh” blueberries? Will the blueberries even be available in Zimbabwe. And, as I swelter through another record-breaking heat dome, I’m reluctant to praise any effort that adds to GHG emissions, no matter how puny those may be in this case.

Rather than “too good to be true”, this scheme is too obvious to happen. Stakeholders, public or private, do due diligence, especially if the “flagship project”, “demonstration case” or “experiment” runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. This is of public concern.

That’s from Prof. Joseph Henry Vogel in reply to a recent(ish) post on decoupled ABS for PGRFA. Read the whole critique here.

Important reminder from Maarten van Ginkel as part of a comment on yesterday’s post about the Australian genebanking publication.

We need strong awareness raising and encouragement to see gene banks not just as final resting places for historic exotic germplasm, but also as portals for highly needed useful genetic diversity for future introgression into modern crops.

Maarten was closely involved in both CIMMYT’s Wheat Genebank and the Australian Grains Genebank.

Susan MacMillan of ILRI contributed a long comment to my short post “Smallholders still produce a lot of food” from a few days back. As she clarifies some of the definitions, adds a reference or two, and points out that livestock are usually neglected in this discussion, I think it’s worth raising its profile here. Do read the whole thing.

So, my take is that ‘it’s complicated’. But as you say, whatever the definitions of terms, people farming relatively small plots of land still produce a whole lot of food for a whole lot of people besides themselves—and they need our support more than ever to continue to do so under ever-more challenging conditions.