Category: Policy

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What’s eating India?

Resources Research undertook a labour of love to produce this graph. It shows, for 20 Indian states, roughly how much of pulses and cereals each tenth of the population eats each month. I urge you to go and read the full post for the details.

Bottom line: Of the 200 populations, 43 are “severely deficient” in cereals and pulses required per month.

The graph is based on data from national surveys of “Consumer Expenditure,” so I don’t know whether it includes food people grow rather than buy, but I doubt that makes much difference overall.

Makanaka makes lots of interesting points about the data, comparing the 2009-2010 survey with a similar one done five years before. Overall, this is a terrific example of open data allowing people to offer alternative interpretations to the standard line.

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Could plant diversity become free (as in speech)?

I’ve been tremendously privileged to be at the Seed Savers Exchange 33rd Annual Campout and Conference in Decorah, Iowa. It’s a wonderful gathering of people interested in saving and sharing seeds, with all sorts of workshops, practical classes, and speakers. One of this year’s speakers was Jack Kloppenburg, of the University of Wisconsin. Kloppenburg wrote First the Seed (now available in a second edition), which is the best analysis of the economic nexus that surrounds seeds and plant breeding. He told the audience he was “here to share an idea, just like you guys share seeds.” So I’m sharing his idea: the Open Source Seed Initiative.

Jack-Kloppenburg

Kloppenburg set out his ideas in a 2010 paper in the Journal of Agrarian Change. In it, he rejects what he calls the “accomodationist” approach to patents and other efforts to restrict access to plant genetic resources. Accomodationists, he says, seek “market mechanisms for compensating those from whom germplasm is being collected”. Instead, he proposes a more radical approach derived directly from the open source software movement. The Open Source Seed Initiative prevents the privatisation of plant genetic resources and, in Kloppenburg’s view, also “might actually facilitate the repossession of ‘seed sovereignty’”.

Open source software is accompanied by a licence that encourages people to share it and create new programs with it, and at the same time prevents anyone from releasing a program that uses the code under any other form of licence. The creativity embedded in the code cannot be privatised. Kloppenburg and a group of like-minded seed companies, plant breeders and academics want to apply similar licences to plant genetic resources.

Kloppenburg is at pains to point out that actually he has nothing against plant patents, other intellectual property rights, contractual “bag-tags” or any of the other mechanisms that commercial breeders use to enforce ownership of their products.

“The problem isn’t the tool,” he told the conference. “The problem is who is using the tool and why.”

There have been three meetings so far to discuss the Open Source Seed Initiative, and although the details have yet to be worked out the underlying concept is simple. An OSSI licence allows me to give you seed (or any other form of plant genetic resources) with only one condition: that you have to share it, and anything you create with it, with exactly the same condition attached.

“It becomes viral,” Kloppenburg explained. “Now ‘viral’ is kind of problematical for people in agriculture,” he conceded, “but it is. It propagates.” As it does so, it creates a protected commons, as opposed to an open commons, of things that can be freely shared but not privatised. That is OSSI’s great potential strength, according to Kloppenburg.

“People who will share are unrestricted. People who won’t share aren’t interested.”

The general idea of a protected commons for plant genetic resources bubbles up from time to time, Kloppenburg told the audience, citing Richard Jefferson’s CAMBIA initiative as one manifestation. He credits the germ of OSSI to Tom Michaels, a bean breeder then at the University of Guelph in Canada, who in 1999 proposed the idea of a general public licence for plant germplasm, or GPLPG.

Kloppenburg stressed that the lack of a monopoly does not mean a lack of payments. As with open source software, there are many ways in which plant breeders and others can seek payment for their services. There could be different forms of OSSI licence, allowing royalty payments to the breeder on the first transfer. And seed companies would be free to charge for OSSI-protected varieties.

Many details remain to be worked out. Who will police the licences, and how? Will it be possible to discover traits shared under OSSI and then incorporated into privatised varieties? How could that be proved? And the global plant genetic resources community has yet to start a serious discussion of the idea. That may prove a hard sell after the long struggle to obtain the current International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which Kloppenburg doesn’t think is working.

The really radical route to establishing a just and agronomically productive regime for managing flows of crop germplasm is not to arrange payment for access to genetic resources, but to create a mechanism for germplasm exchange that allows sharing among those who will reciprocally share, but excludes those who will not.

The current material transfer agreement that accompanies plant germplasm under the International Treaty has some elements of an open source licence about it – but could go much further. Is there any chance CGIAR genebanks, whose holdings constitute the bulk of germplasm available under the International Treaty, could actually lead the way to the just and productive regime that OSSI is looking for, or are they too beholden to the private sector?

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Brainfood: Apples, Solanaceous breeding, AnGR valuation, Seed systems, IPR, Chestnut cryo, C4 exploitation, CC adaptation in China

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Brainfood: Crop genomics, Phenotyping, Smallholders and markets, Yacon diversity, Indian rice HYVs, Sustainable landscapes, Climate models, Food prices

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Root and tuber online mapping bags award

Congratulations to the GIS folks at CGIAR:

RTBMaps — a web-based GIS (Geographic Information Systems) tool to help planners visualize data and analyze options for using roots, tubers and bananas to improve food security, nutrition and income — has been selected for a Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award, presented today at the 2013 Esri International User Conference.

The thing is still in Beta, and there’s a lot more to come, both data and functionality:

RTBMaps is being launched with approximately 25 map layers, which are based on data for RTB crop distribution, indicators for poverty and food-security and some production constraints. However, the number of layers will grow as the GIS specialists at the research centers upload maps for additional pests and diseases, social indicators and other pertinent data. The RTB GIS team will also add applications for simple functions such as printing, or downloading maps for use in presentations. The team has also developed a priority setting application that allows users to weight the importance of different criteria — based on their own research, or consultations — and run analyses that result in unique maps.

Actually that priority-setting bit seems to be already there (more on this below). But for sure it will be nice to be able to share the results, which you can’t really do easily at the moment. And to import your own data, like localities of germplasm accessions, say. Which you also can’t do right now.

What can you do? Well, I couldn’t find much in the way of documentation, but playing around on the site suggests that basically what you can do is display those 25 layers in whatever combination you want on a map of the world. The layers include harvested area for potato, sweet potato, cassava, yam, banana and plantain, and a bunch of other variables: biotic (e.g. cassava mealybug climatic suitability), abiotic (e.g. length of growing period), socio-economic (e.g. % children underweight) and management (e.g. N fertilizer application). Each layer comes with a little pop-up which gives you the legend and lets you change its transparency, so that you could, for example, display cassava area together with climatic suitability for the cassava mealybug, and figure out where that pest is likely to do the most harm. You’d have to do that by eye, mind you, by tweaking the transparency settings. Tricky, and not hugely satisfying, but possible.

No, but wait. There’s a “Tools” tab: always a good sign. That allows you to run something called Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, or MCDA. I think that’s the priority-setting application mentioned above. The way it works is that you choose a crop, then choose from a list of six criteria, and I quote: reduce poverty, food insecurity, nutrition and health, sustainability of natural resources, increase productivity and profit 1, and increase market conditions. So I chose cassava as my crop, and reducing poverty plus nutrition and health as my criteria. You then give a weight to each criterion, 50% each in my case.

Ok, so the next step is to choose indicators for each of your criteria. You’re presented with the same list of 12 indicators for each of the criteria, 2 the first six simply the harvested areas for all the crops in the system 3, the others the following, and again I quote: stunting among children under 5, poverty headcount at USD2 a day, absolute number of poors (sic.) at USD2 a day, irrigation areas, failed season, and accessibility. So I chose the poverty headcount as my indicator for reducing poverty, and stunting as my indicator for nutrition and health. If I had chosen more than one indicator for any of my criteria, I would have been able to give each a weight. But frankly, I was confused enough. Fortunately, I got a little reminder of what I’d done:

rtbmaps

So I clicked on “Run analysis…”, though more in hope than expectation…

I am absolutely convinced that it is a huge technical achievement that the resulting analysis took only about 30 seconds. As my friend Glenn Hyman, one of the people involved, said in the press release already quoted above:

…RTBMaps is the most comprehensive and collaborative GIS web-mapping project to be undertaken within the CGIAR system to date. He noted that the cloud technology that it is based on has only become available in recent years.

I have no doubt all of that is true, and admirable. However, I also have to admit that I have little idea what the map produced by this cloud-technological, and most comprehensive and collaborative, web-mapping project actually means. Here is that map:

rtbmapsresult

Let me hazard a guess. What I think the map may mean is that if your goal is to reduce poverty and improve nutrition and health, in equal measure, and you want to do this via cassava, the areas in red are…what? The places where you would have the best chance of succeeding? The places where you’re going to have the biggest impact? The places where you should go on holiday?

I should have gone to the workshop, I guess. Maybe if I had, I’d be able to understand the whole thing more, and explain it better. And it is still in Beta, so there’s stuff in the pipeline, including documentation, no doubt. The idea of providing diverse maps online, and allowing users to combine them in fancy ways in support of decision-making, is certainly a great one. I really hope to see the promise of RTBMaps fulfilled.