Category: Information

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Can you help this person?

This just in:

Hello,

I am Regis Lemberthe, student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands. I am working, in the frame of my thesis in humanitarian design, on the issue of registering Traditional Knowledge of the Use of Plants as an answer to biopiracy.

I know that some organizations already lead such activities, and I would like to get involved in those in order to make my research more relevant. I want to address two issues that I consider primordial :

How to protect traditional knowledge, regarding the efficiency of registration, and how it could be improved – everything can be improved at some point.
How to promote traditional knowledge, regarding the opportunity to raise public awareness towards this issue in consuming societies.

Of course I am aware that all the problematic doesn’t fit in those two points; challenging this simple vision I have is another reason I want to join practical registering activities.

I would like to know if there are such initiatives being planned on your side that I could join, either as an external observer or, ideally, as part of a working team. Of course I am able to pay for my own expenses.

I hope you will be interested in supporting my research, as I believe design activities – products but also communication or interfaces – can contribute to some extent to improve existing situations.

I remain at your disposition for further information about my project; you can already find some of my materials on the weblog.

For more information about my course, you can visit the website of the school, section “Master” then “Man and Humanity”.

Warm regards,

Regis Lemberthe

Sorry Regis. We can’t actually help directly, except by publishing this letter, because we don’t actually have any initiatives planned in the context of this blog. However, maybe someone else who is reading this can help. There certainly seem to be a lot of people out there who believe that registering traditional knowledge can protect against biopiracy.

The website looks interesting; let us know if anything happens.

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Agriculture illuminates Art illuminates Agriculture

Artists do the darndest things. From WorldChanging, a report on several art projects that involve agriculture as their theme. I was particularly intrigued by three of them. The Acorn Pig asks how long a region famed for its bacon can live on its laurels. Milk maps the movements of links along the chain that turns milk into cheese. And F.R.U.I.T. uses fruit to open the eyes of urban consumers. Each is great fun and a fine time waster, if that’s what you need. But each also has serious points to make about the nature of agriculture and eating today. I just wish artists would do their art and leave writers to write; things might be a lot easier to comprehend.

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Second “Farmer First”

This totally passed me by. The Institute of Development Studies just hosted a workshop entitled ‘Farmer First Revisited‘ from 12-14 December 2007, “to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the original ‘Farmer First’ event.” That event (and the associated book) was quite a milestone, and the papers presented at this month’s reprise look worthy of their illustrious predecessors presented back in July 1987. The very Web 2.0 conference website includes a timeline and blog.

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Tangled Bank #95

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? Was it only two weeks ago that the last biological carnival went up? How much longer can I keep this rhetorical ball of nonsense in the air? Tangled Bank 95 is up, hosted at Ouroboros. Go! Expose yourself to some diverse ideas. You’ve already read the three pieces we had the greedy gall to submit.

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Dope

The answers are in, over at the World Bank’s discussion of its 2008 report Agriculture for Development. There’s a lot of good sense in the report author’s comments, such as the need for country (and region) specific approaches and the care that needs to be taken over commercialization, subsidies and the private sector. There are also some things one might take issue with. For example:

Vitamin A enhanced rice is an example of propoor technology under development which could save millions of lives. This will entail increasing support to public national and international research for crops grown and consumed largely by the poor, as well as strengthening capacity in biosafety evaluation and regulation.

I confess I am really, really amazed to find official World Bank support for this point of view. It is so much easier to boost vitamin A intake by broadening the diet to include orange fruits and vegetables and dark green leafy vegetables. One has to wonder why the World Bank continues to push this particular example of genetic modification when there are others that would be much more defensible if one really wanted to go down that route.

The response to a question about climate change had this to say:

The most urgent investments are in crop varieties tolerant to drought and heat, and irrigation systems. Also countries need to strengthen responses to increase volnerability through crop insurance schemes and safety nets.

New varieties may be part of the solution, but it may be considerably more effective to give farmers the access to a wider range of genetic variability and the capacity to make their own selections of widely adapted, and adaptable, populations in order to be able to cope with climate change. At least that should be tried. Properly.

I confess I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the pretty vague answer to my own question, about quick wins. But Luigi, who asked whether the Bank undervalues diversity in agricultural systems, will presumably be happy with part of the answer:

International support to the Global Crop Diversity Trust should be increased.

I wonder what made Byerlee think of that? The fact that the rest of his answer focuses on the conservation of genetic resources and the use of carbon financing to avoid deforestation? This the party line on the value of agricultural biodiversity: it is a source of traits for those clever breeders to use. True, but there is so much more that agrobiodiversity could deliver, given half a chance.

As we keep saying.