Category: Policy

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More on EU Conservation Varieties

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that meeting in Vicenza was part of an EU-funded project called Farm Seed Opportunities. So the EU funds a project to explore ways of overcoming the strict rules for the marketing of seeds — which the EU sets. This isn’t the only example of a lack of joined up thinking; there are the subsidies to the tobacco farmers ranged against the budget for no-smoking campaigns, and probably others too. But I digress.

The Directive on Conservation Varieties is currently in its 11th draft, and is due to be discussed again by the EU today, 9 November, as Item 5 on the agenda of the Standing Committee on Seeds and Propagating Material for Agriculture, Horticulture and Forestry, an element of the Health and Consumer Protection Directorate General. I think one intention of the Vicenza meeting was to sound out Italian players with a view to making their views known in today’s discussions.

So what are those views? I’m afraid I don’t know. There seems to be a general desire to see farmers and others allowed to market seeds of varieties, balanced by a worry that any legislation may offer big seed companies a low-cost route to marketing their varieties. Some say the maximum amounts of seed prescribed in the draft are too low, which seems to play into the hands of the big seed companies. Is the answer a tighter definition of “conservation” and “amateur” varieties, one that big players would not be able to meet? Or is the answer to reduce quantities still further, so that there is no incentive for the big players to exploit these directives?

Noble farmers experimenting with and exchanging their cultural and agricultural inheritance form a crucial part of the narrative surrounding many objections to Europe’s existing seed laws. If that’s true, then small quantities should be no obstacle. Indeed, they should promote the kind of experimentation and adaptation that lie at the heart of farmer conservation, as they bulk up the seed to make commercial use worthwhile.

Another aspect of the argument around these ideas is that somehow there is a clear and present need to regulate the market for all kinds of seed. Why? I believe that ordinary consumer-protection laws are definitely sufficient as far as seed quality (germination, health) are concerned, and that they could probably cope with questions of identity as well. And for small quantities, where the downside — for incomes and food production alike — is more or less trivial, that ought to be enough.

I’ll be interesting to see how today’s discussions go; in the meantime, civil disobedience seems to be the only alternative.

While we’re on the subject, BBC Radio 4 is airing a two part series called Save our Seeds with the estimable Jonathon Porritt doing his thing. The first programme, on Wednesday 7 November, “explores the ancient origins of our agricultural biodiversity and how scientists are working to gather and secure as many plant varieties as possible.” Part 2, on Wednesday 14 November, “examines the controversial fallout of the Green Revolution and the inherent danger of single variety crops.” Ho hum.

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Brazil reaches out

The website of the Arab Brazil Chamber of Commerce has a long, fascinating interview with Silvio Crestana, president of EMBRAPA, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. Having set up shop in Ghana, EMBRAPA is now thinking of doing something similar in Morocco and Qatar. It is great that the considerable expertise of Brazilian agricultural scientists is going to be shared more widely with the rest of the world. But benefits — including agricultural biodiversity — are expected to flow both ways. Here’s a selection of quotes to give you the flavour:

The whole world will be experiencing … confusions caused by climate change, and if we manage to obtain a plant with a gene that is more tolerant to drought, it will attract a lot of interest.

…

They are well developed in goat raising. They have goats that give birth to three lambs (usually they give birth to a single lamb). This is of great interest to Brazil, to our goat raising centres, which are located in the Northeast. This race is of interest to Brazil. There could be a transfer from there to here.

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Another field of interest is olives, olive trees. They are way ahead of us in that field, and the demand for those is growing in Brazil… It is an ideal field for us to cooperate, they have research, they cultivate many different varieties, they have an amazing variety of olives, small, large, of all sizes and features, for oil, edible ones.

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They also have varieties and research on wheat. They have a very interesting variety of wheat that we are interested in for hybridisations, germplasm banks.

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Our germplasm bank, from the vantage point of tropical biodiversity, is like no other. They would benefit from that.

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Melaku Worede says Africa must protect plant genetic resources

“I get very worried when new technologies are developed and oriented towards exploiting the African farmers. It’s wrong for big agro-multinationals to force African farmers to use new seed varieties which will disempower them and lead to dependency when local varieties suitable to local conditions can be enhanced.

“I get very concerned when European plant genetic researchers use African farmers as guinea pigs. What they cannot do in Europe they do it here in Africa,” said Dr. Melaku, renowned for his pioneering work in plant genetic research and his role in restoring Ethiopia’s food security and plant resources.

This is from a long interview with Melaku Worede in Black Star News. I wonder how accurate the interview is. Doesn’t sound much like the champion of plant genetic resources of old.

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Even Europeans care about agricultural biodiversity

Front page news on the International Herald Tribune’s Europe edition this morning, a long article about the biodiversity being preserved, on the very edges of illegality, in the home gardens of Italy. It’s a good survey of some of the human stories that lie behind statistics of genetic erosion and homilies on policies. I particularly liked the writer’s description of Professor Valeria Negri, a leading light in efforts to study personal efforts to preserve crop diversity as “a plant scientist … who takes in orphaned seeds and raises them behind her home, the way a pet lover might take in stray dogs”. ((Declaration of interest: I was involved in the press conference that resulted in the story.))

Coincidentally, or not, there’s a meeting today on the draft European Directive on Conservation Varieties, taking place at the Centro di Cultura e Civiltà Contadina Biblioteca Internazionale “La Vigna”, in Vicenza, near Venice. They’ll be discussing the opportunities and limits to the draft, and among the speakers will be Guy Kastler, who addressed the Governing Body of the “Seed Treaty” last week. Many other participants too, including some stars of Italian efforts to conserve, document and promote the kind of diversity that gardeners and small farmers find most valuable.

I couldn’t be there (and in any case I am deemed to know nothing about policy); if I were, I would be saying what I have always said about this daft directive. We don’t need yet more legislation, which in any case would restrict varieties to confined geographic areas. We need freedom to market whatever varieties and diversity suit people best, as long as quantities of individual packages at all stages do not exceed a low level that could not possibly be of interest to the “buy once use once” mentality of industrial food production.

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War bad for seeds, seeds good for peace

We asked Jacob van Etten to write about war and agricultural biodiversity after seeing his great website. It’s just coincidence that he sent the following piece in right after we blogged about flooding and genetic erosion. Sometimes things work out that way. Thanks, Jacob. We’re always open to guest contributions…

War can be disastrous for the environment. Think about forest destruction in Kurdistan or burning oil wells in Iraq. But we know very little about agrobiodiversity losses caused by armed conflict. Some time ago, a team of geographers wrote an alarming article about maize biodiversity in Guatemala, where a war raged in the 1980s. They claimed that war and modernization had caused a massive disappearance of indigenous maize varieties. This was based on a quick study of several townships.

However, in a recent restudy, which involved more intensive sampling in a single township, it became clear that several maize varieties were still hiding in the corners. Variety loss was in fact rather low and no varieties were reported to be lost due to the war. What seemed to have changed over the last decades was the social distribution of seeds and knowledge, suggestive of a disrupted social exchange network.

As other studies in Rwanda and West Africa have given similar results, a general picture seems to emerge. The problem is often not the physical survival of seeds and varieties during war. They may be conserved by those who stay in the village or recovered after the violence from fields and secret storages. The main problem is that war destroys the social and economic tissue that underpins agricultural diversity management. Mistrust and poverty will limit the circulation of seeds, leading to access problems and a fragmented local knowledge system. There may thus be a lot of sense in a project of CARE by Sierra Leone that turned the problem of seeds and war on its head. It used the distribution of seeds as a way to evoke discussion on the principles of social exclusion and the causes of the armed conflict.