Category: Funding

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Nibbles: Gates & Slim, Aquino, Home genebank, Quinoa indigestion, Cornish pasties, Exotic vegetables, Funny cheeses, Leafsnap, Beekeeping

  • Bigshots visit CIMMYT, miss opportunity to mention genebank. No, wait…
  • Bigshot visits IRRI, including genebank.
  • Yeah but who needs those anyway, you can make your own!
  • Now the French want their say on quinoa.
  • Speaking of the French, you think there is any horsemeat in Cornish pasties?
  • “I grew up with zucchini, but I prefer the flavor and texture of angled luffa.”
  • Gotta love the fact that there’s a thing called the Rogue Creamery.
  • Missed the fact that Leafsnap had been named one of the top 10 science apps of 2012.
  • Germans report on Italians helping Ethiopians. To keep bees. One suspects Ethiopians could teach Italians and Germans a thing or two about keeping bees, but that’s another story.
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Nibbles: Banana extinction, Sacha inchi, PES for dairying, Millets, Fermentation, Breadfruit and coconut

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Nibbles: Yarsagumba, Chocolate meet & dig, Beer dig, Mapping disease, Mapping language, Going digital, Urban ag meet, Weird citrus, CGIAR genebanks and more, Microbiome

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It’s official: genebanks valuable

You may remember that back in the summer we blogged about a project to assign a monetary value to the Greek genebank. Well, although the project’s website says nothing about any results yet, a video has surfaced which does give some numbers. Here’s the money shot:

greece

And that’s just insurance value. Add to that productivity benefits (which unfortunately are not given in the film), and divide by what it costs to run the place (idem), and you find that “the comparison is favourable — the benefits far far exceed the costs, which means that having the genebank, investing in the genebank, maintaining and developing the genebank, is a desirable policy.” Well, that’s kinda expected, but it’s good to hear it from a Professor of Economic Theory and Policy. We all, I’m sure, look forward to seeing the spreadsheet. Because yeah, sure, money isn’t everything, but it does talk. Especially, these days, in Greece.

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TraitAbility and the Treaty

I don’t know enough about either vegetable breeding or intellectual property protection to venture a guess as to the significance to that industry of Syngenta’s new online effort to streamline the licensing of some of their varieties and associated enabling technologies, which they’re calling TraitAbility. I’m not even sure what success would look like, either for Syngenta or anybody else. Alexander Tokarz, Syngenta’s Head of Vegetables 1 suggested at last week’s event accompanying the launch of the TraitAbility portal that he might well be happier if other companies were to follow suit with similar opening-up initiatives in the next couple of years than if he were to be inundated with e-licenses from day one. Full disclosure: I know that because I was there, at Syngenta’s invitation:

No word yet from either those other companies, potential licensees, or indeed growers. But nevermind all that. I still think TraitAbility may turn out to be quite important, for two related reasons. First, because it’s a clear parallel to the International Treaty, at least in the sense that — in albeit a smaller, more halting way, and at the other end of the variety development pipeline — it is ostensibly trying to make access to genetic diversity and technologies simpler and more transparent. Which suggests the intriguing possibility that the ITPGRFA, if it didn’t actually force anyone’s hand, at least in some way paved the way, or helped create the space, for what Syngenta at any rate is heralding as something of an innovation. And second, because, whether or not there was in fact such a causal link with the ITPGRFA, the parallel which is indubitably there might suggest to Syngenta that some of that license money should maybe flow back into conservation. Innovation is needed all along that pipeline to make it sustainable, not just at the business end.

LATER: