Category: Policy

Posted on

Open seeds

We’ve blogged a couple of times about the Open Source Seed Initiative. The first time was when Jeremy interviewed Jack Kloppenburg, whose idea it was, back in 2013. The second yielded this little gem:

“It’s almost like a haiku,” says Irwin Goldman a professor of horticulture at UW-Madison and plant breeder, who has released two of his carrot varieties under the OSSI. “It basically says these seeds are free to use in any way you want. They can’t be legally protected. Enjoy them.”

Well, it turns out there’s a German version as well, as well as a project in east Africa. That’s according to a new policy brief from CIRAD.

It’s not quite a haiku, but here’s how the approach is described by Selim Louafi and his co-authors:

This approach is distinct from the public domain, whereby anyone has free and open access to the seeds, with the inevitable risk of free appropriation. Conversely, the open source approach is based on viral effects (i.e. the same conditions apply for any subsequent use) and non-proprietary assets: it reverses the intellectual property rights rationale by introducing negotiated terms of access and use with the aim of keeping seeds in a protected commons.

Long may it prosper.

LATER: And no, it isn’t lost on me that the past three posts on open source seeds, seed sector innovation and extension services could all have been mashed up into one mega-post on sustainable seed systems. But I do have a day job. Anyone want to give it a go?

Posted on

What to do about extension services

Traditional extension does not always provide the most useful information to farmers

You don’t say. Anyway, that’s the first finding of a review of “nearly 50 randomised evaluations on the constraints to the productivity and profitability of smallholder farming” carried out over the past eight years by the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative (ATAI) with support from the Gates Foundation. Here’s the second:

At the same time, training and information services can be critical in contexts where novel technologies are being promoted

So what can be done about it? Here’s the short version:

  • tailor information to individual farmers
  • use tools that make information easier to understand
  • leverage social networks
  • offer extensionists performance-based incentives
  • move beyond price information

If you want to hear it from the horse’s mouth, try this:

Is the game worth the candle? Well…

…we…acknowledge that the productive potential of better information dissemination is fundamentally limited by the value of the content being disseminated, and many of these positive results are associated with relatively small improvements in farmer welfare.

So maybe not. What strikes me, though, is that the underlying paradigm is still one-way flow, i.e. FROM extentionists TO farmers. In the context of management of agricultural biodiversity, I’d actually like to see more information going the other way.

Posted on

Brainfood: Coca phylogeny, Potato taste & nutrition & resistance, CC & nutrition, Light & nutrition, Remote poverty, Spicy toms, Input subsidies, Broilerocene, European livestock then & now, Bean domestication, Peach domestication, Machine conservation, Habitat fragmentation, Conservation planning, Taxidermy, Wheat diversity, Livestock GS

Posted on

Nibbles: Magic beans et al., Avocado etymology, Honey please, Pig maps, Banana pics, Commons, Diet footprint, Sparing/sharing, Old caviar, Old whiskey, Potato wild relatives, Cassava breeding, Apple double, Ancient potatoes, Ancient grapes, African cooking, Native American craft beer, Agricultural heritage site, Aboriginal biodiversity, Svalbard 10th, Alpaca calendar.

Posted on

The multifarious origins of food

Could it be that we neglected to say anything at all back in the summer of 2016 about our friend Colin Khoury’s paper Origins of food crops connect countries worldwide? I can hardly believe it, but I can’t find anything at all in the blog’s archives. Weird in the extreme. 1 We were very good about Colin’s Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security, but we seem to have dropped the ball on the follow-up. Anyway, here’s the money quote from the abstract:

Countries are highly interconnected with regard to primary regions of diversity of the crops they cultivate and/or consume. Foreign crops are extensively used in food supplies (68.7% of national food supplies as a global mean are derived from foreign crops) and production systems (69.3% of crops grown are foreign). Foreign crop usage has increased significantly over the past 50 years, including in countries with high indigenous crop diversity.

You can explore the data on CIAT’s wonderful companion interactive website.

I bring this up now because Colin has come up with neat infographics illustrating how even nationally iconic foods like pizza can trace the origins of their ingredients to multiple regions of the world.

Now to do it for Mseto wa Maharagwe.