- “Organic management practices appear to result in elevated levels of grain micronutrient concentration.” By no means the whole story.
- Tom too takes The Economist to task.
- Afghanistan’s opium growers. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
- Nixtamalization for the rest of us. More than you could ever want to know. Rye tortillas!
- Chocolate began with leftover beer? Seems unlikely.
- Take the fight to the monster’s lair. Swap seeds in Brussels. h/t Patrick.
- Dogs or dholes? Yeah I didn’t know what they were either.
- There was a workshop on “Seed System and Climate Change” in Bhutan a month ago.
- Big biofuel project in Tanzania bites the dust. And the land they “leased,” what happened to that?
- Ancient grinding holes. Might mesquite be another edible never domesticated?
One view of plant patents and other forms of intellectual property rights
Let’s say you go to a restaurant and have a lemon cheesecake. You love it, so you reverse engineer it in your mind and make it at home to serve a Tupperware party. As soon as the party starts, jack-booted thugs arrive wielding guns and drag you away as a criminal for stealing a recipe. The cook is dragged away, same as a real thief or murderer.
That is the short version of what has happened to the food and agriculture industry over the last 30 or so years
Jeffrey A. Tucker, of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, explains “agri-patents”.
Not exactly how I would describe the way things stand, but then, I haven’t had to tussle with the jack-booted thugs of the intellectual property rights owners. Not even in a movie. ((About “a new method of growing corn,” apparently, or possibly “a new genetic corn that will grow in the desert,” or something. Can you tell I haven’t seen it?.)) Nor, I suspect, has the author of the piece, whose logic, I have to confess, I found somewhat hard to follow. Plant patents etc. are “not an evil of the market; they are an evil of government intervention,” and as such “have handed socialists the best case they’ve ever had to rail against capitalistic exploitation”. Maybe there’s another way of looking at these things?
Nibbles: Cloves in Zanzibar, Invasive species, Fingerprinting genebanks, Seed ownership, Pollinator photography, Columbids
- Clovefield.
- They Eat Invasives, Don’t They?
- The Wrong Seeds.
- Seeds of One’s Own.
- Bee Photographs.
- Clay Pigeons.
Nibbles: Buckwheat, Dates, Book, Apples, Geographical indications
- Buckwheat yields boosted by diversity in nearby forests.
- Date (press) with the past, in Qatar.
- Sustainable Intensification: Increasing Productivity in African Food and Agricultural Systems. A bit steep at GBP65 for 30 papers; we’ll be reading and sharing what we find.
- Apples, endangered? Well, yes.
- What’s so good about geographical indications anyway?
Nibbles: Disease, Tobacco, CGIAR, Food Security, Nutrition, Soil, Popcorn, Quinoa, Aegilops
- How to breed a better brassica.
- Kenya encourages farmers to switch from tobacco to food.
- The King is dead … Long live the King.
- A very long post about Challenges to Genetic Diversity and Implications For Food Security in South Asia.
- Plumpy’nut set free, more or less.
- Dirt, the movie — I’d like to see that.
- Real popcorn, Yaqui style.
- Quínoa andina podría cultivarse en desiertos del mundo. Don’t they have their own orphan crops?
- Red List assessment of nine Aegilops species in Armenia. New wheat wild relatives paper.