Category: Intellectual property rights

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Brainfood: Organic ag, Garlic conservation costs, Spelt malting, Wild rice genetics, Diversity and ecosystem function, Old late blight, Urbanization and biodiversity, Seed laws, DNA from herbaria, Fruit & veg & school, Quinoa bars, Maize introgression

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Nibbles: Irish Famine book, Breeding for adaptation, Neolithic diets, Randy Thaman, Ecological Babylon, IPR for smallholders, Botanical gardens

  • Don’t underestimate the importance of a new book on the Irish Famine, despite the weird construction used in praising it.
  • Impossible to overestimate the importance of crop breeding for climate change adaptation. And would you like a presentation with that?
  • Cannot underestimate the diversity of early Neolithic diets. No, wait.
  • Difficult to overestimate the contribution made by Prof. Randy Thaman to the conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Pacific. One of several honoured by IUCN for services to conservation.
  • Fed up with linguistic tricks? Well, too bad, because here’s another one. It turns out you can use agricultural biodiversity terminology as examples to explain what’s wrong with ecology.
  • Here we go again. Easy to underestimate the importance of IPR legislation in enabling smallholders to conserve agrobiodiversity.
  • Plain impossible to list the x best botanical gardens in the world.
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Where Kasalath rice landrace really comes from

The conversation about Kasalath rice continues, with some actual information about the accession in question. The back story has kinda sorta made its way into the mainstream media too. Reuters published the picture below yesterday (30 August).

A scientist locates the rice variety kasalath inside the gene bank at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Laguna

“A scientist locates the rice variety kasalath inside the gene bank at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Banos, Laguna, south of Manila August 30, 2012. A team of scientists from the IRRI, led by Sigrid Heuer, say that they have discovered a gene called PSTOL1, or Phosphorous Starvation Tolerance, which increases grain production by 20 percent by enabling rice plants to grow stronger root systems for better intake of phosphorus, an important but limited plant nutrient. The discovery will help poor rice farmers grow more rice for sale, even while working on phosphorus-deficient land, according to Heuer.”

I guess we’ll just have to take Reuters’ word that the scientist is indeed locating Kasalath and not some other sample.

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Nibbles: Aguaje, Super pasta, Banana battery, Tomato love, Tomato hate, Microgreens, NUS, Fortuneii, Coffee, Uran agriculture

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Sovereign rights raises its ugly head

Where’s my guide to the netherworld of genebank databases when I need him?

I need him to make a somewhat snarky point. A recent commenter objects to the characterisation of Kasalath, the “wild” rice that’s been in the news lately, as Indian.

Kasalat is actually a Bangladeshi variety not Indian. In Bangla it means Kacha Lota or green shoot. From time immemorial it has been grown in the eastern district of Sylhet of Bangladesh from where it might have gone to India…. [I]t is just plain wrong to describe it as an Indian variety.

But as Wikipedia tells us,

The history of Bangladesh as a nation state began in 1971, when it seceded from Pakistan. Prior to the creation of Pakistan in 1947, modern-day Bangladesh was part of ancient, classical, medieval and colonial India.

So when was Kasalath collected? Or, to put it another way, what was the name of the nation state in which the place that Kasalath has grown from time immemorial found itself at the time someone collected it?

That’s what databases are for, right? IRIS, The International Rice Information System, has 12 entries for entities called Kasalath, three of them at IRRI and one in India. I couldn’t find anything as dull as an accession date for any of them. IRIS is a bit unfriendly, 1 although thanks to it I did also discover that Kasalath is one of about 400 varieties selected to form a Rice Diversity Panel. Until Beatrice returns from his travels, or logs on, that’s the best I can do.

And the point, of course, is to suggest that the very idea of a variety grown since time immemorial belonging to any Johnny-come-lately nation state is, alas, a cruel joke.