Category: Intellectual property rights

Regular readers will remember last year’s flap over the UK’s National Fruit Collection, which is looked after by the Brogdale Horticultural Trust and managed by the University of Reading at Brogdale, Kent. I won’t rehearse the details again, but suffice to say there was some doubt about the collection’s future. There’s now news from the Daily Telegraph that the collection has been “saved” by the Prince of Wales:

…three separate collections of the 1,000 most important breeds have been sold to the Prince of Wales, the Co-operative supermarket group and an anonymous Scottish businessman. ((Actually, not so anonymous.)) Each will plant their saplings in different parts of the country.

There’s not much more detail than that in the article, and of course we’ll work our contacts to try to find out more, and indeed to verify the accuracy of the newspaper accounts. But there are a couple of points about this statement that are a little worrying. At the very least, the whole thing raises a lot of interesting questions.

Let me start by saying that it’s certainly a good idea to safety duplicate (or triplicate in this case) germplasm collections in different places, especially field collections, which are particularly prone to accident and mishap. ((I’m afraid I dont know if the collection is maintained in tissue culture under slow growth or cryo conditions, but one would hope so.)) But how exactly were the thousand accessions chosen? There are 2,300 apple varieties in the collection. How does one measure the “importance” of each of these? One measure might be how much they’ve been used, either directly in plantations or in breeding. But wouldn’t such varieties be the ones in least need of conservation? It would be good to know what criteria were used to make the selection.

My second worry is over the fact that the germplasm has been “sold.” For how much, exactly? And how was the amount calculated? And what does that mean about access to that material by potential users, either in the UK or overseas? ((Added later: I should have pointed out that it is not clear from the newspaper account whether a copy of the collection will remain at Brogdale.)) Apple is on Annex 1 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Ex situ conserved Annex 1 material in the public domain and under the control of a Party to the Treaty, which the UK government is, is supposed to be made available to users under a “facilitated” access and benefit sharing regime. Does this privatization of part of the collection affect its status under the Treaty? If so, has the Treaty Secretariat been informed? It’s not as if the new owners won’t be trying making money out of it:

The Co-op intends to produce a “heritage apple juice” from some of the breeds by the end of this year. William Barnett, who heads up The Co-operative Farms’ 800-acre fruit-growing operation at Tillington in Herefordshire, where the apple trees are being planted, said: “Some of the apples date back to pre-Victorian times. They were originally dessert apples, but became less fashionable and failed as modern commercial varieties.”

What if someone else wants to try the same thing? Under what conditions will they have access to the material?

As I say, lots of questions. If anyone out there has the answers, we’d love to hear from you.