- Beer yeast was domesticated in the 1600s. Or maybe not.
- I see that and raise you 65 million years.
- If you don’t like beer, try Lurvill’s Delight, but it’s only about 100 years old, I warn you.
- Preserving ancient fruits in an Italian orchard.
- And how many different types of vinegar do you think the vinegar museum has?
- The Caribbean coconut is under attack.
- We’ve been such bastards to the environment.
Nibbles: Turkish seeds, KBA, Wild ginger, ICARDA, AGRA, Weird agrobiodiversity, Coffee journey
- Ancient seeds put on life support. Not holding my breath.
- Key Biodiversity Areas to be mapped. Agrobiodiversity also? Not holding my breath.
- Botany on reality TV? Not holding my breath. No, wait…
- More on the ICARDA story. Holding my breath.
- Kofi Annan on that “uniquely African Green Revolution.” Not holding my breath, but here’s the latest report on how AGRA is doing. Oh, and there’s more on Africa, from IFPRI this time.
- A caterpillar on the Silk Road. Now, that I’d like to see.
- But not before coffee.
Brainfood: African rice, Soybean resistance, Peruvian cuisine, Aromatic rice, Cowpea diversity, Wild barley diversity, High throughput phenotyping, Cacao core, Niche foods, Tajik wheat breeding
- Domestication history and geographical adaptation inferred from a SNP map of African rice. Evidence of strong selection for salt tolerance over protracted domestication period.
- Genome-Wide Association Study of Resistance to Soybean Cyst Nematode (Heterodera glycines) HG Type 2.5.7 in Wild Soybean (Glycine soja). 43 resistant accessions out of 235.
- Food incursions into global heritage: Peruvian cuisine’s slippery road to UNESCO. How the 1% eat.
- Differentiation and description of aromatic short grain rice landraces of eastern Indian state of Odisha based on qualitative phenotypic descriptors. There’s morphological diversity within aromatic types.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L. Walp). 768 cultivated types from 56 countries in the USDA collection fall out into 3 genetic groups, but no obvious geographical structure.
- Geography of Genetic Structure in Barley Wild Relative Hordeum vulgare subsp. spontaneum in Jordan. 3 genetic groups again, and no geographic or climatic structure, again.
- Utilization of a high-throughput shoot imaging system to examine the dynamic phenotypic responses of a C4 cereal crop plant to nitrogen and water deficiency over time. Who needs morphological descriptors?
- Establishment of a Core Collection of Traditional Cuban Theobroma cacao Plants for Conservation and Utilization Purposes. 185 out of 537 hardly seems worth it.
- Promotion and Utilization of Niche Foods for Food and Nutrition Security. Termites with your spider plants, madam?
- The History of Wheat Breeding in Tajikistan. Seems, according to the authors, to have been a waste of time.
Nibbles: Saffron startup, Genebank software, Teff redux, Heirloom fruit & veg
- Counting on saffron in Afghanistan.
- Counting on GRIN-Global in genebanks.
- Counting on teff as the new super grain.
- Counting on heirlooms.
IP for smallholder farmers
Thanks a lot to Susan Bragdon for summarizing her latest paper for us.
The Quaker United Nations Office has released a paper by Chelsea Smith and myself looking at the relationship between intellectual property (IP) and small scale farmer innovation. The paper will also be available in Chinese, French and Spanish shortly.
IP systems are an attempt to incentivize innovation in agriculture and ensure its availability to the public. The familiar mantra holds that breeders and scientists need incentives to create. However, the majority of innovation in agriculture happens in absence of IP rights — on the farm, by small-scale farmers. And what they’re doing is important.
While small-scale farmers themselves are typically not driven to conserve, develop, adapt, invent and otherwise display their immense ingenuity for the ends of attaining exclusionary rights to commercialize their “products”, some kinds of IP tools have the potential to actively support their efforts. Or at the very least leave farmers to do what they do in peace. The paper discusses how alternative or sui generis plant variety protection systems (as opposed to UPOV-style PVP systems), collective and certification trademarks, and geographical indications may support on-farm innovation — when carefully selected and adapted to suit the realities of domestic agricultural sectors.
On the other hand, IP tools that are more conventionally believed to incentivize innovation in agriculture (i.e. patents, UPOV-style PVP systems, and less commonly trade secrets) may actually impede farmers’ innovation.
The paper is part of QUNO’s work to build mutual understanding of the importance of small scale farmers and agrobiodiversity across treaty bodies of relevance. There is quite a complex international legal architecture relating to small-scale farmers, innovation and IP, including the CBD, Nagoya Protocol, ITPGRFA, WTO TRIPS Agreement, UPOV and the WIPO IGC. Unfortunately, we have very little, if any real collaboration going on among the secretariats of these treaties to try to establish some coherence: coordination tends to be limited to formal reports sent from one governing body to another. We’re going to need to do a lot better in order to meet SDG 2 relating to food security.