Category: Featured

Robert reads a writer’s mind:

He claims that “old-fashioned seeds are better at dealing with variable weather”. It is my impression that he wanted to avoid that his readers draw the conclusion that these seeds should therefore be reinstituted; which would seem logical. And so he brings it up to dismiss it, as “their use will mean less food”.

I’m not so sure.

Danny is optimistic about the increasing integration of agriculture in biodiversity conservation, as in the new IUCN book, but ends on a note of caution:

Yet still very much open to interpretation. Compatible forms of agriculture? Compatible for who and for what?

The Evil Fruit Lord defends the rights of plant breeders:

I think a fair amount of the hostility towards GURTs stems from a general hostility towards plant IPR’s.

And that just ain’t right.

Kevin makes a good point about the use of Google in rural Kenya:

Good story but a slight cavil. It wasn’t Google that “helped harvest a bumper crop” but the source of information he found on Google – wherever that was from. And of course, if the crops had failed I doubt whether the news story would have said “Google responsible for disastrous harvest.”

The Evil Fruit Lord sounds off:

I have gotten more and more alarmed over the past few years at the level of hostility found among many well-educated, progressive people, to the very concept of intellectual property rights in plants (as in people owning rights to plant varieties, not plants themselves holding patents, which I’m not sure I’m cool with either). On some level I take this really personally, because it almost seems like its saying, basically, that what I do as a plant breeder has no real value. Why else would it be absolutely okay for everybody to share freely in the products of my labor?

There’s more. Should we worry about the end of plant breeding?