- CIMMYT finds some Turkish wheat landraces. In Turkish fields that is, not its genebank.
- CIP puts orange sweet potatoes onto Indian fields.
- Food price crisis did not affect overall food security. Overall.
- Something else to do with avocado seeds apart from sticking toothpicks in them and dunking them in water.
Nibbles: Farmer suicides, Ethnobotanic gardens, Seaweed, Sweet potato origins, Sustainable livestock, Cacao
- Farmer suicides in India blamed most recently on high food prices. The BBC debunks the numbers, and about everything else about the claims, without mentioning IFPRI.
- Reviving the ethnobotanic gardens at the University of Kent in England.
- Zanzibari women are successfully farming seaweed.
- Sweet potatoes came from all over.
- Unpacking sustainable livestock, one slide at the time.
- Sandy Knapp et al. chase Solanum all over South America.
- Everybody’s developing their own sustainable cocoa strategies. Not ideal.
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:
#AccessIP Success for Syngenta would be adoption of model not necessarily lots of licenses in first month.
— AgroBioDiverse (@AgroBioDiverse) January 17, 2013
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:
@AgroBioDiverse Ha, love the footnote. Also like donation idea, why not for signers during first 6m? Spread the word! http://t.co/mBm9YqUo
— Alexander Tokarz (@alexandertokarz) January 19, 2013
Nibbles: Genome assembly, Congo livelihoods, Tilman, Peak farmland, Lima bean project, Cotton award, Translocation, Sudanese seed, Pachyrhizus, Conference, Agro-ecology, SEAVEG, Indigenous foodways,
- The latest genomic whiz-bangery.
- CIFOR’s Congo slideshow makes The Guardian. About as far from genomic whiz-bangery as you can get.
- Speaking of which… Very long talk by David Tilman. Almost certainly worth watching in its entirety. Eventually. It all depends on trade-offs. See what I did there?
- Agriculture stops expanding. Is it all that genomic whiz-bangery?
- U. of Delaware gets big Lima bean grant. Yes, Delaware. They got whiz-bangery in Delaware too.
- Meanwhile, Texan cotton breeder gets award. For a certain amount of whiz-bangery.
- Translocation and restoration: cool, but a last resort, whiz-bangery says.
- Support for the seed sector in S. Sudan. Any landraces? No whiz-bangery in sight.
- And likewise for the yam bean in Africa.
- Wonder whether that’ll be on the agenda at the First Food Security Futures Conference in April. Probably not.
- Nor, probably, will anyone be thinking too hard about agro-ecology; but you could be, with this handy-dandy introduction to holistic management.
- SEAVEG; no, not nori etc, but veg in SE Asia.
- Different animals need different kinds of fodder, ILRI shows how.
- Wishing success to the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative launched at the University of Arkansas today.
Nibbles: CGIAR vision, GFAR vision, UNEP vision, Tree seeds, Aerial vision, Visions of potatoes, Soybeans, DNA sequencing, Rewilding
- The latest bit of CGIAR navel-gazing is about whether research should be for or in development.
- The Futures of Agriculture: Brief No. 42. No, really, 42. Love that plural, though
- And of course UNEP needs to have its say too.
- Oh, wow, someone actually doing something.
- How about a visionary use for tree seeds? Burn ’em!
- Then there are visions of potato diversity.
- And a vision of a world covered in soybeans.
- And DNA sequences as far as the eye can see. So, can we get all those wild relatives done now, just for the heck of it?
- Can you take one more vision? Here’s one of rewilded Europe.