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The slippery politics of agricultural biodiversity

It happens sometimes. You see a bunch of apparently random, unrelated things, and then after a while suddenly it hits you that there’s a thread of sorts running through them after all. It’s a trick of the mind, of course, but still. Take my reading these past few days. It included a review of an old exhibition on the historical links between Venice and the Orient (an interest of mine), a newspaper article on the latest developments on Cyprus (an old stamping ground of mine) and a paper from the International Institute of Social Studies on food sovereignty (homework). I suppose I should not have been surprised, but the nexus of agrobiodiversity (and its products) and politics turned out to be a point of connection among these, if maybe not an actual thread. Here’s how.

Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 was the title of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2007. There was a review of it at the time in the NY Review of Books, which I ran into at the weekend while binge-reading William Dalrymple stuff. Among many great observations, there was this little gem on the diplomatic missions between Venice and Egypt:

The emissaries would have been carrying large numbers of Parmesan cheeses, apparently the diplomatic gifts most eagerly favored by appreciative sixteenth-century Mamluk governors.

I don’t know what it was, maybe the slightly surreal image of a Venetian trireme being unloaded at some slippery Nilotic dock, the sweaty Parmesan wheels hoisted laboriously onto richly baldaquined camels as turbaned dragomans look on, but the sentence stuck with me. 1 And so did the following, this morning, while scanning a piece in the International Herald Tribune on the latest, hopeful signs from the tragically divided island of Cyprus. I spent several years there back in the 90s, and I try to stay informed:

In 2010, the community planted a Peace Park, an oasis with 1,100 carob trees and a playground. Soon after, the group restored a dilapidated Frankish cloister abutting the church, less than 500 feet from a Turkish mosque towering in the sun.

See, there it is again, agrobiodiversity helping out with politics.

Ah, but wait. I really should not be calling it that at all, should I. Because, according to Patrick Mulvany in a footnote in the paper Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, which you may remember we nibbled last week:

The term Agricultural Biodiversity is, in the English language, the accepted term in the United Nations FAO and CBD and by many authors that come from a public interest perspective. It is also a useful term in that it highlights the ‘cultural’ dimension. The reductionist term ‘agrobiodiversity’, though common in translation in other languages (and translation from those languages), is sometimes used by institutions and individuals who consider agricultural biodiversity mainly as an exploitable resource.

And there I was thinking that “agricultural biodiversity” and “agrobiodiversity” were completely interchangeable terms. How naive of me. Don’t you just love agricultural biodiversity? There’s politics even in what you call it.

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Brainfood: Weird coconut, Rainforest management, Pollinators and grazing, Pre-Mendel, Italian grapes, Indian fibre species, Cereal relatives, Brazil nut silviculture

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The rice in Spain grows mainly for the snails

I suspect Prof. Foster was being facetious, and in any case would have to fight it out with other researchers working in a different direction, but maybe temperatures in England will soon be as suitable for rice cultivation as the rainfall regime. In Europe (and indeed Japan and New Zealand) the northern limit of rice cultivation seems to be at about 40-45 deg N, which covers the famous growing regions of the Po Valley in Italy and the Camargue in France. However, the very northernmost limit of rice cultivation in the world is at about 53 degrees N, which would put it at the latitude of Liverpool, say. So the south of England may not be entirely out of bounds in the future, if you factor in climate change and clever plant breeding.

Of course, as we read yesterday, temperature is not the only constraint to rice production in Europe. Spanish rice farmers are fighting an exotic snail, which may spread from the Ebro delta, which incidentally is on the 40th parallel N or thereabouts. Although rice has been in Spain since maybe the 8th century, its cultivation in the Ebro is relatively recent.

The first Designation of Origin for rice in Europe was granted to Calasparra rice which is grown in a mountainous area along the river Segura in the region of Murcia, the varieties being Bomba and Balilla X Solana. Both are sold as either brown or white rice. Bomba rice is the best-known of the Spanish varieties. Its grains are rounded but they increase lengthwise by almost fifty per cent during the cooking process and are very absorbent.

Also protected by a Designation of Origin is the rice grown traditionally in the Júcar river basin and in the Albufera, the most famous of the natural wetlands in Valencia where the varieties are Senia, Bahía and Bomba. The rice, mostly Bahía, grown in the Ebro delta in Tarragona (Catalonia) is also covered by a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI).

For the benefit of prospective English rice farmers, Bomba is available from the Spanish genebank, and elsewhere too. No word on whether there is material somewhere resistant to the ravages of Pomacea insularum.

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Featured: Seed law

So I asked whether James Ming Chen “would actually prevent seed saving,” and Clem rapidly shot back more questions.

If you mean “Will seed saving (legal or otherwise) actually be prevented” then I can’t say from skimming Chen’s paper cited here. However, if the question amounts to “Is he serious”, then I’d have to say – very much so.

I’m not finding any mention of publicly available germplasm in the piece, perhaps I’ve not looked closely enough. All the argument seems to be in favor of breeder’s rights and indeed there is plenty of disgust with the opportunity cost borne by breeding businesses that must invest in protection schemes so as to capitalize on their investment in breeding.

What I’m curious about in the seed law discussion on your side of the pond is how public domain germplasm will be treated… would seed of an heirloom variety be only available through gifting and non-commercial exchange? If someone grows a public domain seed and subsequently offers the same for commercial sale, will a purchaser have any recourse or claim if said seed is found to be other than described?

Ooops. I’ve just bitten the end of my tongue off, not rising to the bait of the “opportunity costs” borne by the poor beleaguered seed industry.

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What’s up in seed laws?

The notion of farmers saving seed from one harvest to plant for the next is deeply ingrained, especially in ideas about subsistence and sustainable farming. Indeed, that process is usually seen as the foundation of all agriculture, to be abandoned at our peril. In the early 1990s, we saw attempts to shift the discussion on intellectual property from the farmer’s right to save seed of a formally-protected variety to the farmer’s privilege to do the same. Much of the rhetoric that attempts to stick it to The Seed Man focuses on seed saving, and the impact that F1 hybrids, GMOs and other evils will have on farmers who want to save their own seeds.

It is not surprising, therefor, that there’s a lot of sound and fury around the subject. From which melée I offer two snippets.

Bifurcated carrots is keeping a close eye on the progress of the proposed new European seed laws through the labyrinthine corridors of power. He’s hopeful that the lack of progress is a good thing, because it will start the whole process again.

While the seed industry thinks the proposal can be fixed with a few small changes, this is not the position of most seed related NGOs around Europe. It is certainly not our position. The current proposal is not without some good aspects, but overall it’s seriously flawed and should be rewritten.

James Ming Chen, a lawyer, will have no truck with any silly emotional, nostalgic idiocy.

Seed-saving advocates protest that compelling farmers to buy seed every season effectively subjects them to a form of serfdom. So be it. Intellectual property law concerns the progress of science and the useful arts. Collateral economic and social damage, in the form of affronts to the agrarian ego, is of no valid legal concern.

But would he actually prevent seed saving?