Category: Policy

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Some people don’t want to register their traditional knowledge

The ingratitude! Apparently villagers in the Uttar Kannada district of the Western Ghats in India have not been entirely truthful with the folks collecting information for the local Biodiversity Register. These registers have been promoted as a way of collecting local traditional knoweldge in order to protect against biopiracy and give local people some sort of intellectual property rights. But, like jealous cooks at a bake-off, some seem to withholding information.

“People have not given details of prescriptions, compositions and the methods used to cure ailments the traditional way using plants with medicinal properties. The information we have might be incomplete. In some cases, people have just mentioned plants but haven’t revealed how they use them for treatment.”

That’s according to G M Bhatt, president of the Biodiversity Management Committee of Heggarni. Villagers say they fear that they will lose control of their knowledge and their resources, even if it is “protected” in a biodiversity register.

They may have a point. According to the report, when it was discovered that a local plant, Malabar tamarind (Garcinia gummigutta), contained a compound that could “cure obesity” it was rapidly overharvested and is now in short supply. (That could well be true; the GEF Small Grants Programme funds a project on the conservation and domestication of G. gummigutta.)

What I wonder is, where did villagers ever get the idea that their local resources might be open to overexploitation?

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Practical policy research opportunity

Good news, everyone. There’s money available from a programme called BiodivERsA ((No comments, please, on the beauty, or otherwise, of that particular name.)) You have to come up with a proposal for an international research project to:

  • link scientific advancement to challenges in biodiversity policy and conservation management;
  • generate new knowledge and insights with the eventual goal of use in policy and management;
  • generate added value to national research projects across Europe by linking expertise and efforts across national teams.

Furthermore, it should have to do with biodiversity, and should link scientific advance to policy and practice. And it should include partners from other ERA-net countries. The online pre-proposal form will be available from next Monday, 10 December.

So you could, for example, decide to study the impact of european legislation on levels of agricultural biodiversity and then propose policy solutions that would increase the diversity farmers and others can easily make use of. But they’ll never fund you.

I wonder what they will fund.

Hat tip: Ecology and Policy.

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Selling the idea of sorghum in southern Zambia

it is fair to say that most farmers in the Southern Province are extremely dissatisfied with growing maize. It fails to meet expectations, year after year, as erractic rainfall and localized droughts reduce yields. But maize is the only marketable crop for farmers (the government is the buyer), so they keep growing it even though payment times can be incredibly drawn out (some farmers have yet to be paid almost 6 months after harvest!) It’s a catch 22 that keeps rural households food insecure and low on cash. Sorghum, with its drought tolerance and available market can address these dissatisfactions.

This from a long and fascinating post — one of those first-hand field reports I find so interesting — from a worker with CARE in Zambia. Thulasy B. has some intriguing insights into the whole business of agricultural development, things that I have no experience of. She also has a blogroll that might be a goldmine for people interested in this area.

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Ethiopia and the ITPGRFA

Ethiopia’s Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (IBC) has a nice new website. Interestingly, it includes an interactive feature called BioForum. I was surprised, however, to see no reference to the Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA) in the section on access. Since Ethiopia has been a Party to the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture since 2003, IBC should be using the SMTA for transfers of Annex 1 material, surely.

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A genebank opens

Tunisia just got a new genebank. Which is fine. But it will come as a surprise to many to see it described as “the first African as well Arab Gene’s Bank.” It is certainly not the first genebank in Africa, nor the first in the Arab world. It isn’t even the first one in Arab Africa. I don’t think it’s the first one in Tunisia, in fact. FAO has information on about 1,400 genebanks around the world. It would be very difficult, I think, for a new genebank to be the first one anywhere. Ok, maybe Antartctica. Although actually I heard today in the SIRGEALC corridors that Argentina keeps a safety duplicate of its material on its territory there. I really need to verify that. The Arctic, of course, is taken. Or it will be on 24 February 2008 when the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opens. Fourteen hundred genebanks. My question is: with the International Treaty on PGRFA and its Multilateral System of facilitated access and benefit sharing now in force, at least for some crops, how many genebanks do we really, truly need?