Category: Featured

Mary Winfree Found our post “Churros and peaches in the Canyon de Chelly” useful:

My back yard holds a sacred place and cemetery, we found it when a neighbor tried to build a road right up to my back door and the bones came up. We brought in Cadaver dogs who revealed a whole cemetery. It was a blessing in disguise because when we went to replant the bones of my little Indian Grandmother, there were more bones from the same tribe, that needed a home. They had been buried and then disturbed by a big hiway, and no place had been found for them. Now they will join the ones in my yard. We are holding a homecoming party for them. Songs both sad and happy, a BBQ and where they are replanted they are planting peach trees – now I know what that means…

We’re glad we were able to help a little.

This is too perfect for words. You’ll remember that I was a little confused by a strange report on a GM purple tomato that somehow wasn’t GM because it was bred from GM parents. Or something. Matthew now reveals that it is even more confusing than I first thought:

You’ll notice that the photo of the “GMO” purple tomato is from Oregon State University. It’s actually a photo of one experimental line from Jim Myers classical breeding program that last year released a new purple commercial variety. Here’s the press release they took it from: http://horticulture.oregonstate.edu/purple_tomato_faq.

We’ve written about those GM purple tomatoes before, and about Oregon State’s breeding programme. Nothing since then has changed my mind on the topic.

Patrick gets it: beyond fitness for purpose, freedom of choice is all people want from seed laws.

Everything else can more effectively be dealt with through the free market. If farm-saved seed, local adaptation and the value of diversity don’t translate into farm profits and productivity, then they will cease to exist. If people want to buy DUS and VCU, and these are more productive, so be it. If one seed company produces seeds deamed in some way to be better than their competitors, then farmers can choose those seeds.

So I guess he’d agree with Dave’s point:

As to Holly point: “There’s nothing wrong with growing whatever you want.” I agree – but tell that to the people who are blocking Mexican farmers growing GM maize. The activist-imposed `regulation’ tries to stop farmers in ill-defined Centres of Crop Origins growing GM crops (brinjal in India, maize in Mexico).

Some very good news from Mohamed Amar, head of the Egyptian Deserts Gene Bank:

I can confirm that we have been rebuilding the Egyptian deserts gene bank in new form during the year and a half.

Here’s hoping we get more information soon.

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?