- 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: Organic penalty, Rye gaps, Sustainable diet indicators, Wheat evolution
- Commercial Crop Yields Reveal Strengths and Weaknesses for Organic Agriculture in the United States. The headline will be that organic yield is 80% of conventional, but the results are far more nuanced than that suggests.
- Genetic Distinctiveness of Rye In situ Accessions from Portugal Unveils a New Hotspot of Unexplored Genetic Resources. More collecting needed.
- A Consensus Proposal for Nutritional Indicators to Assess the Sustainability of a Healthy Diet: The Mediterranean Diet as a Case Study. 13 indicators of sustainability described, from “Vegetable/animal protein consumption ratios” to “Diet-related morbidity/mortality statistics.”
- Reconciling the evolutionary origin of bread wheat (Triticum aestivum). One slightly changed ancestral subgenome, one much-changed ancestral subgenome, and one weird hybrid subgenome involving the previous two plus another. Basically, we were insanely lucky to get wheat.
Moral panic and produce
It’s hard to be a hipster these days. No sooner are you told that your quinoa habit is ruining the livelihoods of Bolivian farmers, that news comes along that your guacamole is contributing to deforestation in Mexico. Fortunately, data, and sober analysis, are on hand to provide a measure of reassurance to our beauteously bearded brethren.
Nibbles: Artisanal bread, Phenotyping, Maris Piper, Algae, Superfood debunk, Banana 101, Indian millets, Wheat seed photosynthesis, Chili evolution
- Nice tweeting about bread and other Central Asian food over past few days.
- Rothamsted’s “Scanalyzer“.
- The genebank origin of the UK’s premier potato, Maris Piper.
- Seaweed in South America.
- Repeat after me: superfoods are a scam.
- Third and final instalment in The Plate’s history of the banana.
- India going on a millet kick.
- The wheat seed is C4? Totally crazy.
- The evolution of Capsicum in half a page. Which is both too much and not enough.
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.