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

Nibbles: Big Ag, Agroecology, Open seeds, Canadian garlic, CSN, CGIAR, Mary Jane, Rapid phenotyping, DSI, Roman gardens

  1. Yay Big Agriculture!
  2. Don’t listen to them: yay agroecology!
  3. Come down everyone, DW with the balanced view on open seeds.
  4. Meanwhile, there’s a project to document all the garlic varieties grown in Canada.
  5. And the Community Seed Network is hard at work.
  6. All those seeds are going to have to be kept alive: this is how the CGIAR genebanks do it.
  7. Morocco thinks about legalizing kif.
  8. Need help phenotyping your kif, Morocco?
  9. 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.
  10. Ok you’ll need a palate cleanser after that, I suspect: Roman gardens, perhaps?