- Food contributes 1/3 of greenhouse gas emissions.
- How we got to the above.
- And a focus on how farming started in South Asia in particular.
- A long-term seed experiment carries on.
- Another chapter in the story of the comeback of the American chestnut?
- Want to help a heirloom make a comeback?
- There’s a newsletter on the law and policy behind all this stuff.
How to do Farmers’ Rights
Are you interested in Farmers’ Rights? If so, the Plant Treaty has an inventory for you.
The Inventory of national measures that may be adopted, best practices and lessons learned from the realization of Farmers’ Rights, as set out in Article 9 of the International Treaty (the Inventory), was developed by the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Farmers’ Rights, based on the mandate it received from the Governing Body at its Seventh Session.
In preparation for the Inventory, the Governing Body invited Contracting Parties and relevant stakeholders, especially farmers’ organizations, to submit views, experiences and best practices as examples for the national implementation of Article 9 of the International Treaty. The Inventory thus relies on the submissions received from the Contracting Parties and stakeholders. The focus is on measures and practices that have been or are in the process of being implemented.
LATER: It occurs to me not all readers might know what Farmers’ Rights are. It’s remarkably difficult to get a definition, but maybe this comes closest:
Farmers’ Rights consist of the customary rights of farmers to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seed and propagating material, their rights to be recognized, rewarded and supported for their contribution to the global pool of genetic resources as well as to the development of commercial varieties of plants, and to participate in decision making on issues related to crop genetic resources.
Farmers’ Rights are addressed in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, but are not defined there.
Is Big Agriculture Best?
Jeremy’s latest newsletter out, and he has a challenge for you.
Bursting my own self-reinforcing bubble, as, in fact, I often do, I forced myself to read this fascinating article in Foreign Policy. If only they had phrased the headline as a question – Is Big Agriculture Best? – it would have met my expectations even more perfectly. Let’s just say that I disagree, but not entirely.
My biggest problem with the piece is what it omits on the negative side, and those are well-enough known that in all honesty I cannot be bothered to go through with a point by point rebuttal. And yet, there is precisely one conclusion in the piece with which I wholeheartedly agree.
See if you can find it. Answers by email, please. No prizes though.
Brainfood: PES, WTP, Agroforestry, SPA, Urban trees, Plant uses, Fish diversity, Gene editing, Algae, HTP, Cassava breeding, Barcoding, Grasspea genomics, Ancient farmers
- Reducing Hunger with Payments for Environmental Services (PES): Experimental Evidence from Burkina Faso. Paying farmers during the lean season for keeping trees alive results in better diets and livelihoods.
- Payments for Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources in Agriculture: One Size Fits All? No, pay pig prices for pigs and sheep prices for sheep. No word on effects on diets and livelihoods.
- Factors influencing the adoption of agroforestry by smallholder farmer households in Tanzania: Case studies from Morogoro and Dodoma. Mainly access to seeds and land. No word on effects on diets and livelihoods.
- Seed production areas are crucial to conservation outcomes: benefits and risks of an emerging restoration tool. Somebody mention seeds?
- Trees and their seed networks: The social dynamics of urban fruit trees and implications for genetic diversity. Maybe just source your seeds from cities?
- Maximum levels of global phylogenetic diversity efficiently capture plant services for humankind. Species chosen from diverse lineages are more diversely useful than species chosen at random. Now to make sure seeds are available.
- Aquatic biodiversity enhances multiple nutritional benefits to humans. Basically the above, but with fish.
- Improving Nutritional and Functional Quality by Genome Editing of Crops: Status and Perspectives. Or, we could just genetically edit some random species, fish or otherwise.
- Exploring, harnessing and conserving marine genetic resources towards a sustainable seaweed aquaculture. Maybe even seaweeds?
- Picturing the future of food. I wonder if the high-throughput phenotyping described here will work on seaweeds.
- New cassava germplasm for food and nutritional security in Central Africa. 16x greater fresh root yield than the local landrace check wouldn’t need fancy phenotyping to pick up.
- Reliable genomic strategies for species classification of plant genetic resources. This high throughput genotyping and data analysis approach certainly seems to work in picking up misidentified crop wild relatives in genebank collections. No word on seaweeds yet though.
- Grasspea, a critical recruit among neglected and underutilized legumes, for tapping genomic resources. Including its wild relatives, of course.
- An integrative skeletal and paleogenomic analysis of prehistoric stature variation suggests relatively reduced health for early European farmers. Who’d be a farmer, though, eh? But then they didn’t get payments for ecosystem services, nor gene-edited seaweeds.
Nibbles: Big Ag, Agroecology, Open seeds, Canadian garlic, CSN, CGIAR, Mary Jane, Rapid phenotyping, DSI, Roman gardens
- Yay Big Agriculture!
- Don’t listen to them: yay agroecology!
- Come down everyone, DW with the balanced view on open seeds.
- Meanwhile, there’s a project to document all the garlic varieties grown in Canada.
- And the Community Seed Network is hard at work.
- All those seeds are going to have to be kept alive: this is how the CGIAR genebanks do it.
- Morocco thinks about legalizing kif.
- Need help phenotyping your kif, Morocco?
- Soon there will be lots of sequence information on that kif, and then you’ll need a way to regulate access, and this study for the European Commission might help.
- Ok you’ll need a palate cleanser after that, I suspect: Roman gardens, perhaps?