Category: Policy

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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.

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Flooding and genetic erosion

The floods in Tabasco are causing enormous human suffering and extensive damage to crops, homes and infrastructure, but one of their impacts has not been mentioned. Of course, crops in the field have been lost, which is bad enough, but it is likely that farmers’ stores of seed are also gone, as was the case in Bangladesh during recent flooding there. That probably means that farmers in flood-affected areas have lost much of the agricultural biodiversity which they will need to rebuild their livelihoods — and lives. Will they get it back?

Unfortunately, seed relief efforts — focused on the immediate emergency — have sometimes not taken a long-term view of the problem, introducing the wrong varieties in the wrong way, and thus making a sustainable recovery that much harder. In the words of a recent paper commenting on the seed relief effort after Hurricane Mitch: “Providing seed in the wake of a disaster can seem both appropriate and simple. Often, it is neither.” Advice on agrobiodiversity-friendly, sustainable seed relief is available, but whether it is followed or not in Tabasco we shall see. ((See also Richards and Ruivenkamp’s Seeds and Survival for a review of the role of crop genetic resources in reconstruction after wars in Africa.)) In any case, we can probably add some measure of genetic erosion to the horrors the Mexican flooding has wrought.

Later: As chance would have it, the day after I posted the above Eldis summarized a review of seed aid interventions.

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Free the grape!

I blogged a few weeks back about the shift in the approach being taken in Europe to protect traditional farmers and producers — and the agrobiodiversity which underpins their livelihoods — in the face of globalization. Rather that erecting subsidies and tariffs to compete on price, the idea is to move upmarket and sell expensive niche products to rich foreigners. Of course, that requires a quality control and labelling system, such as appellations of origin (aka geographical indications).

Well, there’s a downside to such systems. I was idly going through my feed reader today and I ran across an old post on The Fruit Blog (a great blog which unfortunately seems to have gone dormant of late) which pointed to a 2004 article in the International Herald Tribune about how legislation is being used in Europe to basically outlaw some old American grapevine varieties:

The story has been all but forgotten in France today except among a handful of wine experts and a gaggle of bureaucrats who enforce the law. The French government banned wine made from American grape varieties on the grounds that it tasted like raspberries and was thus offensive to the palate. The European Commission adopted the French rule in 1979, making it illegal to grow these varieties anywhere in the European Union.

The percentage of outlawed American grape varieties is relatively small in France. But the offending vines are also sprinkled widely throughout several East and Central European countries that have recently joined or will soon join the European Union.

“You can’t tell the Hungarians, Bulgarians and Romanians to uproot their vines,” says Pierre Galet, perhaps the world’s leading expert on grape varieties. He believes the ban on American varieties is anachronistic.

Shades of what Jeremy has called Europe’s draconian seed laws. The US, in contrast, is not shy about mixing up the American and European grapevine genepools (I have blogged about this before: funny how much I write about wine).

As I say, the IHT article is a few years old, and things may have changed. Something is afoot in the EU with regards to wine legislation, but I wasn’t able to find any more recent analysis of the specific issue of the old American varieties. If you know the latest Brussels scoop on this, let us know.