Public access to the Defra owned National Fruit Collection is managed by Brogdale Collections (at no cost to Defra) and we are expanding what we offer in everything about fruit from the history of the varieties and the way fruit was grown (mostly in gardens) to the future, the development of new varieties and why people would be wise to eat more fruit for their own health, especially in Britain.
Rejoice! No word on what the charges might be for getting hold of germplasm. Ah, but:
Verified trees became important for breeding new varieties and the Collection is now part of the international community of The International Treaty of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.
How is agriculture being presented? As the enemy, as usual? Or is the “landscape approach” rhetoric gaining purchase? Anyone want to share their impressions with us?
UK pharma giant GSK. 1 They process poppies grown by some 400 farms around the island, which go on to become the basis for many important global medicines. It is a very R&D oriented business, as new plant varieties are constantly being developed to produce increasingly sophisticated alkaloids.
If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you’ll know what comes next, and I hate to disappoint.
Why on earth is Tasmania encouraged to produce “half the world’s legitimate opiates,” while the same liberty and investment are not afforded the poor farmers of Afghanistan? Britain has interests there too, I believe. Less than a year ago the cumulative cost of those interests was estimated at GBP18 billion. How much would have been needed to create a properly constituted market that would adequately reward Afghan farmers for their resilience, agricultural know-how, and contributions to on-farm conservation? How much might such an effort have saved in not having to combat the people who are supporting Afghan farmers?
It isn’t just the drugs. Madden notes that
Nothing is wasted: the poppy seeds which are a by-product are sold into the catering industry. When you tuck into a lemon and poppy seed muffin anywhere in the world, the chances are the seeds came from GSK in Tasmania.
Funnily enough, that doesn’t impress me either. Were there no sour notes in the High Commissioner’s trip?
My only disappointment was to learn that these poppies are all white, rather than the red ones we associate with Poppy Day in the UK.
How very parochial, and biologically unbriefed.
The red poppies — Papaver rhoeas as opposed to P. somniferum — don’t produce opium or morphine, although they make plenty of thebaine. And believe it or not, thebaine is often the basis for those “increasingly sophisticated alkaloids,” and Tasmanian researchers are working hard to block synthesis at that point, so the poppies would be “useless for the illicit drug trade“.
Ok, so let’s recap, there’s the Global Forest Disturbance Alert System (GloF-DAS), then there’s InfoAmazonia.org (also, like GloF-DAS, written up by Mongabay.com), and finally (?) there’s Terra-i, which has just got a write up by the NY Times, no less. All online mapping platforms. All nicely interactive. All about forests. All doing somewhat different, but related, things. You just have to wonder if there might not be some mileage in bringing them together in some way.
Andy Farrow has some issues with crop mapping too:
I found Monfreda and SPAM were ‘better’ in different places when I was reviewing the legumes but still there are large areas of confusion between, for example, common beans and cowpeas.
Oh, and he too would like to know how exactly the people behind the Global Yield Gap Atlas decided to use HarvestChoice’s Spatial Production Allocation Model to do their mapping.
