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Potato seeds or seed potatoes

It’s a curse, knowing (and caring) too much. Last week, we dutifully nibbled a Spanish-language report that seeds from Peru’s Potato Park were on their way to the Bóveda Global de Semillas de Svalbard. The BBC, equally dutifully, seems to have retailed the same story. But hang on. Are those true potato seeds, in which case I’ll just relax and go home? Or are they potato seed tubers, capable of safeguarding actual varieties, rather than merely a diverse sample of potato DNA? The BBC certainly suggests the former, by specifically mentioning one of the varieties by name.

I had always thought that named potato varieties do not breed true from true seed. so if seeds are being stored, then why bang on about varieties? And if it is seed potato tubers, which do preserve variety characteristics, why are they being stored at Svalbard, where they’ll die pretty quickly?

Someone put me out of my misery.

A greater curse is the curse of unreliable technology. This post was supposed to magically appear three weeks ago. It didn’t. I don’t know why. And I was on the road at the time. No wonder it evoked no response …

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Diversifying Crops May Protect Yields in the Face of a More Variable Climate

That’s the headline on a note from the American Institute of Biological Sciences, which publishes the excellent BioScience. Resilience in Agriculture through Crop Diversification: Adaptive Management for Environmental Change, a review by Brenda Lin of the CSIRO in Australia, pulls together lots of studies 1 from lots of places and lots of species (and varieties) to come to the conclusion that, yes, indeed,

Understanding the potential of increasing diversity within farm systems is essential to helping farmers adapt to greater climate variability of the future. By adopting farm systems that promote ecosystem services for pest and disease control and resilience to climate change variability, farmers are less at risk to production loss and are more generally resilient to environmental change.

Thanks Eve.

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One view of plant patents and other forms of intellectual property rights

Let’s say you go to a restaurant and have a lemon cheesecake. You love it, so you reverse engineer it in your mind and make it at home to serve a Tupperware party. As soon as the party starts, jack-booted thugs arrive wielding guns and drag you away as a criminal for stealing a recipe. The cook is dragged away, same as a real thief or murderer.

That is the short version of what has happened to the food and agriculture industry over the last 30 or so years

Jeffrey A. Tucker, of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, explains “agri-patents”.

Not exactly how I would describe the way things stand, but then, I haven’t had to tussle with the jack-booted thugs of the intellectual property rights owners. Not even in a movie. 2 Nor, I suspect, has the author of the piece, whose logic, I have to confess, I found somewhat hard to follow. Plant patents etc. are “not an evil of the market; they are an evil of government intervention,” and as such “have handed socialists the best case they’ve ever had to rail against capitalistic exploitation”. Maybe there’s another way of looking at these things?