Policy

November 5, 2026November 6, 2026

Basil instinct

I don’t know much about Thai cooking. So when I came across a “furore” (no less) over some new varieties of something improbably called holy basil, purporting to be an important ingredient in that country’s cuisine, my first reaction was to wonder whether the whole thing was a joke.

It wasn’t. Holy basil turns out to be Ocimum tenuiflorum, but, unlike the plant itself, the type of controversy it has engendered is fairly familiar to me.

CPRAM, a subsidiary of Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Group, has secured protection for four new varieties developed for its ready-meal business. The protection was registered in 2024 and runs until 2036. It doesn’t amount to ownership of holy basil: farmers remain free to grow, save and trade traditional varieties, and only commercial propagation of the protected ones needs permission. That has not stopped worries about Thailand’s plant variety protection law, especially the prospect of a move to the stricter UPOV 1991.

The crop itself is more interesting than the argument. It is clearly something I should have known about. It is widely cultivated and culturally important in SE Asia, though its genetic diversity is less well documented than its medicinal properties. An Indian study of 38 accessions found that 91% of the measured molecular variation lay between accessions rather than between geographical regions. Another study of 109 Indian accessions found considerable differences in plant architecture, leaf and seed characteristics, flowering time and essential-oil content. For Thailand, researchers looked at 20 landraces and five commercial cultivars and found substantial variation, with both groups spread across two broad genetic clusters. They did warn that rising demand and farmers’ liking for commercial cultivars could eventually erode local diversity, though they saw no cause for immediate alarm.

There is also more in genebanks than I initially guessed. A search of Genesys turns up 163 accessions, 67 of them from Thailand. Of the total, 82 are listed as available through the Multilateral System of the Plant Treaty, mostly via the World Vegetable Center. Holy basil isn’t an Annex I crop, so those listings are voluntary. Anyone getting material that way signs the Standard Material Transfer Agreement, which includes benefit-sharing obligations if a commercial product incorporates it and isn’t freely available for further research and breeding.

Holy basil was being tended in household gardens and temple courtyards long before anyone thought of registering a variety. Whatever comes of the IPR row, that accumulated diversity is worth protecting. And I want to grow some too.

October 19, 2026October 17, 2026

Brainfood: WorldCuP, Crop origins, Abrahamic plants, UK landraces double, Ex situ change, Santorini vineyards, Apulian olives

WorldCuP: A database of checklists documenting the World’s Cultivated Plants and their distributions. Cool new database records 1,444,325 occurrences representing 91,358 accepted cultivated plant species across 2,718 regions in 156 countries. Geographic coverage is extensive but uneven, with notable gaps in parts of Africa, southwest and central Asia, and Oceania. Most of the taxa recorded are not in existing major crop and useful-plant databases.
Integrating multiple disciplines to locate the origins of domestication of crops. Combining evidence from botany, biogeography, genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and history overturns the traditional Mesoamerican hypothesis for cacao origins, supporting domestication in western Amazonia, probably involving multiple events. Peach palm’s domestication is best placed in southwestern Amazonia. Cupuaçu remains unresolved. Now for the other 91,355 species.
Plant Species Mentioned in Abrahamic Scriptures: Implications for Biodiversity and Traditional Agriculture and Horticulture. Olive, grapevine and fig, together with cereals such as wheat and barley, occur prominently across the three scriptural traditions examined, while date palm is particularly prominent in the Qur’an. Not clear whether scriptures qualify as checklists.
Crop landrace conservation, status, challenges and motivations in Great Britain. A national inventory (checklist even) identifies 566 landrace populations maintained on farms by 197 growers, alongside 1,876 British-origin genebank accessions, representing a total of 1,201 distinct landraces. Cereal and vegetable landrace cultivation has gone up since 2004, but forage diversity is increasingly threatened. Climate change, labour shortages and lower yields are the main challenges reported by growers.
An inventory, threat and conservation assessment of UK wheat landrace diversity. The UK currently has 27 wheat landrace varieties growing on more than 700 hectares, an increase in both variety numbers and cultivated area since 2009. Interviews with 50 farmers identify insufficient market demand and limited seed availability as key constraints. So, not climate change, labour shortages and lower yields.
Strong differentiation between source and ex situ populations of rare plant species revealed by next-generation sequencing. Across four rare plant species, ex situ populations showed significant genetic differentiation from their wild sources despite only one generation in cultivation, while overall genetic diversity and inbreeding did not differ significantly. Unrepresentative seed collection, unconscious selection during propagation or genetic drift could explain the differences. Something to test on all those British landraces, labour permitting?
Rethinking the vineyard of Santorini in a changing climate and preserving an historic wine region. Recommends a staged transition from vineyard recovery to ecological regeneration, prioritising soil organic matter, drought management and indigenous grapevine diversity. Sounds like lots of labour will be needed.
Conservation dilemmas: Xylella fastidiosa and the future(s) of olive farming. In Puglia, disease management is pushing olive farming towards competing futures: intensive, mechanised production vs the preservation of ancient trees as cultural landscapes. The fate of traditional groves depends less on technical disease solutions than on whether markets, subsidies and labour arrangements make their continued care economically viable. Well that doesn’t sound promising. Maybe try prayer?

October 16, 2026October 16, 2026

Africa gets behind genebanks

The African Union Commission organized a Seed Summit under the theme “Resilient Seed Systems for a Food Secure Africa”, hosted by the Kingdom of Eswatini from 5-7 October 2026.

The results are summarized in the Ezulwini Outcome Document, which includes the following:

Given the precarious state of many national genebanks, it’s really good to see the call to “strengthen and sustainably finance…” them “…in Member States.” Though I would have preferred to see that phrased as “…by Member States.”

The document is a ministerial outcome that I believe still has to go through AU policy organs for validation and endorsement, so nothing here is binding yet. It sets no funding figures, timelines or locations for the continental genebank, and it uses verbs like “support” and “request” rather than “establish.” Nevertheless, the recognition of the importance of genebanks is very welcome. We will keep a beady eye on how this develops.

October 14, 2026October 14, 2026

Nibbles: Bacon kitchen garden, Bison diversity, African herbaria, Mycorrhiza, China wild rice genebank, African seed laws

Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s painting records the arrival of American crops in early modern England. And the cookmaid gets equal billing.
North America’s bison survived near-extinction, but how much of its genetic diversity is left? Past and present DNA is helping reconstruct what was lost, with implications for how what remains is conserved and managed.
China’s wild rice collection in Hainan now holds more than 15,000 samples. A genetic treasure trove, but its value ultimately depends on what breeders can make of it. Much like what’s left of bison diversity.
Mycorrhizal fungi form vast underground networks that support plant life and store carbon. A new global map begins to show their extent, and just how much of this biodiversity remains overlooked.
Africa’s herbaria hold centuries of botanical history, much of it still effectively invisible. Specimens can reveal shifting plant distributions and overlooked species. First, though, someone has to do the painstaking work of getting the data online.
Africa has done painstaking work on seed laws, but getting good seed to farmers remains hard in practice. The gap between policy and delivery is stark, and commercial companies need to work alongside farmer-managed seed systems, not pretend they don’t exist.

October 6, 2026October 6, 2026

Nibbles: African food systems, Uganda cassava, Uganda pastoralists, Butternut conservation, Seed transfer zones webinar, Frozen Zoo, India fish genebank

Swapping maize for indigenous crops won’t fix African food systems designed around markets and policies that still favour a narrow range of crops.
Cassava is both a food security fallback and a commercial crop in Uganda, but disease, climate change and declining diversity make its conservation an increasingly urgent form of insurance. But what about the markets and policies?
When livestock and crops fail, Ugandan pastoralists draw on wild plants for food, underlining how much food-system resilience still sits outside the formal agricultural system, with its markets and policies.
The Morton Arboretum is using living collections and genetic research to help the threatened butternut tree cope with changing conditions.
Webinar discusses global approaches to seed provenancing and transfer zones, useful for anyone who wants to move native plants without moving the wrong genes. Butternut very interested.
San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo preserves genetic material of plant and animal species that may disappear, from DNA to cells to organisms. Butternut volunteers.
New Indian facility combines ex situ fish conservation with community aquaculture. Good model for much of the above?