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Organic seeds enmeshed

Grain has published a new briefing on “the politics of organic seed certification.” It makes all the usual points, most of which boil down to the fact that when there is a fixed cost for something — anything — bigger players benefit. There’s plenty of good information in the briefing, and in the annex that details the requirements of different regulatory bodies. But the one fundamental question I don’t see asked, let alone answered.

Why did the bodies that represent organic growers even contemplate legislation that would make “organic” seeds compulsory?

Seriously, this is something that has bothered me from the start. Lord

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Task the Ask Force

A friend alerted me to the Ask Force, hosted at something called the Public Research and Regulation Initiative. According to the site, “On this ‘ASK-FORCE’ page, PRRI publishes frequently asked questions that refer to publications that are either not supported by properly peer reviewed scientific research.” Breathless with excitement, we hurried to the section on agriculture. What a terrific list of topics, to whit:

  • Biofuels: what will the positive and negative impact be?
  • Is co-existence between organic farming and GM crops possible
  • Will GM crops end small scale farming?
  • Did GM Crops cause health problems for the farmers?
  • Were the Indian farmers committing suicide because of GM crops?
  • Are GM crops are less well adapted to the local environment than local landraces?
  • Are GM crops an economic desaster?
  • Do GM crops cause higher pesticide and herbicide usage?
  • Do GM crops cause new pests?
  • Does GM crop planting create super weeds?
  • Do GM crops decrease the yields?

Alas, the answers to these frequently asked questions remain “under development”. Like you, dear readers, I’d be delighted to read those answers. But there’s no RSS feed, and I’ll be blowed if I am going to return to the site every day to check. A word to the wise, Emeritus Professor Klaus Ammann: get a feed.

I noticed later that one can get a feed from a bulletin board hosted by the European Federation of Biotechnology, which raises another question. Why duplicate the content?

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Can you help this person?

This just in:

Hello,

I am Regis Lemberthe, student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands. I am working, in the frame of my thesis in humanitarian design, on the issue of registering Traditional Knowledge of the Use of Plants as an answer to biopiracy.

I know that some organizations already lead such activities, and I would like to get involved in those in order to make my research more relevant. I want to address two issues that I consider primordial :

How to protect traditional knowledge, regarding the efficiency of registration, and how it could be improved – everything can be improved at some point.
How to promote traditional knowledge, regarding the opportunity to raise public awareness towards this issue in consuming societies.

Of course I am aware that all the problematic doesn’t fit in those two points; challenging this simple vision I have is another reason I want to join practical registering activities.

I would like to know if there are such initiatives being planned on your side that I could join, either as an external observer or, ideally, as part of a working team. Of course I am able to pay for my own expenses.

I hope you will be interested in supporting my research, as I believe design activities – products but also communication or interfaces – can contribute to some extent to improve existing situations.

I remain at your disposition for further information about my project; you can already find some of my materials on the weblog.

For more information about my course, you can visit the website of the school, section “Master” then “Man and Humanity”.

Warm regards,

Regis Lemberthe

Sorry Regis. We can’t actually help directly, except by publishing this letter, because we don’t actually have any initiatives planned in the context of this blog. However, maybe someone else who is reading this can help. There certainly seem to be a lot of people out there who believe that registering traditional knowledge can protect against biopiracy.

The website looks interesting; let us know if anything happens.

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Agriculture illuminates Art illuminates Agriculture

Artists do the darndest things. From WorldChanging, a report on several art projects that involve agriculture as their theme. I was particularly intrigued by three of them. The Acorn Pig asks how long a region famed for its bacon can live on its laurels. Milk maps the movements of links along the chain that turns milk into cheese. And F.R.U.I.T. uses fruit to open the eyes of urban consumers. Each is great fun and a fine time waster, if that’s what you need. But each also has serious points to make about the nature of agriculture and eating today. I just wish artists would do their art and leave writers to write; things might be a lot easier to comprehend.

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Africa needs an old-fashioned green revolution

An article in The Africa Report, published by the Rockefeller Foundation, outlines several good news stories achieved “with not a petri dish-induced genetic manipulation in sight”. While one may quibble with the details — how many engineered genes can you actually see — one cannot fault the conclusion: old-fashioned breeding is more likely to deliver the goods than GMOs. The article is at pains to point out that the early emphasis of the Rockefeller Foundation and Bill Gates on biotechnology was “slow and expensive”. Conventional breeding, by contrast, has resulted in fast-growing disease-resistant cassava and better bean varieties. ((“Roughly half the beans grown on the continent are eaten by weevils, not by people.” That’s astonishing.)) The article also stresses the need for investment in agriculture:

There is broad agreement among economists that countries like India, China and Vietnam all kick-started their economies by accumulating an agricultural surplus, which not only created healthier and more productive workforces, but also released manpower that would otherwise have been devoted to farming.

No argument on that score. In other respects, though, I’d have to say that the “new” approach doesn’t go quite far enough. For example, it contrasts Africa’s variable landscape with the “uniform” coastal plains of Asia that responded to “the high-yield variety of paddy rice”. Professor Mark Laing, the expert quoted to support that view, goes on:

[I]n Asia … you are able to use a single superior variety suitable for this habitat. This can’t work in Africa, because it doesn’t have these coherent zones. For example, between South Africa and Zimbabwe you need four different varieties of soybean.

Four whole varieties! Africa’s farmers deserve better. They deserve a rich diversity of crops and a rich diversity of varieties. While old-fashioned breeding, suitably beefed up with better training for African breeders, is a good start, making full use of farmers’ own expertise as participants in the breeding process would be even better.