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Patenting systems good for vegetable diversity

Here’s a turn-up for the books. Our friends at the CAS-IP blog link to a couple of papers that examine the influence of intellectual property rights on vegetable diversity. I’m going to come right out and admit that I haven’t read the papers. But like CAS-IP, I’m intrigued by this quote:

More than 16% of all vegetable varieties that have ever been patented were commercially available in 2004.

Or, to put it another way, less than 84% of all vegetable varieties that have ever been patented were no longer available in 2004.

The primary argument for maintaining crop diversity 1 is based on the need to maintain a safety net of genetic diversity, to have a broad supply of genes available to breeders who can create more productive, weather-hardy, insect resistant, fungus resistant, and better-tasting crops. … If the meaning of diversity is linked to the survival of ancient varieties, then the lessons of the twentieth century are grim. If it refers instead to the multiplicity of present choices available to breeders, then the story is more hopeful.

The crucial part, of course, is how to measure diversity, and how you interpret it. I deliberately snipped out what I consider the money quote from the passage above. Here it is:

We hope our findings stimulate a discussion about the proper measure for that diversity.

Off you go. Discuss away.

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Person shows unsolicited interest in agrobiodiversity shock

So there I was, riding the morning train to work, lost in a Ted Talk, as usual. Interesting enough, about diarrhea in India, and how even though rehydration therapy is saving hundreds of thousands of lives, babies are still dying. Then he overlays his slide of a bridge to nowhere with a bunch of words, to make the point that he isn’t talking only about diarrhea, that the problem lies in “the last mile,” getting women actually to use the cheap, available rehydration salts. That sort of problem is common to many areas, and it is nothing to do with poverty, or lack of education. On any given day, 25% of the diabetics in North America are not using their insulin properly. And blow me if, at around 4’40” in, he doesn’t say this:

It’s not just medicine. Here’s another example from technology: agriculture. We think there’s a food problem, so we create new seeds. We think there’s an income problem, so we create new ways of farming that increase income. Well, look at some old ways, some ways that we’d already cracked: intercropping. Intercropping really increases income. Sometimes in rice we found incredible increases in yield when you mix different varieties of rice side by side. Some people are doing that. Many people are not. What’s going on?

Wow! Here’s a guy who gets it. What I found so interesting is that for the rest of his talk Sendhil Mullainathan focused on ways to help individuals to overcome their cognitive and psychological biases and do the right thing, even though at some level they don’t believe it is the right thing. It’s the whole idea of nudging people to change their behaviour. What I found particularly intriguing about the agricultural example is that it isn’t the farmers who need nudging. It’s the people who allocate research funds, and who run (or more likely shut down) extension services, and who deliver what they think poor farmers need or want.

These are the people who need to be nudged. I just wish I knew how. If you’re rich and educated, you can eat the diverse diets that offer better health. But you can also deny that option to poor people. You can invest in a hedge fund, but you can also promote an agricultural system that permits no hedging. What’s going on?

I know there are times when we sound like a cracked record 2 when we bang on about the disconnect between agriculture and conservation, or the more general lack of awareness of the importance of agrobiodiversity. But this made such a nice change. So, not that you need it, thank you Sendhil Mullainathan.

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Review calls for support of Kew genebank

The independent review of Kew Gardens commissioned by Defra is just out. It has some very nice things to say about the Millennium Seed Bank, and quite rightly so.

The work of the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) is particularly impressive, and the MSB has forged partnerships with more than 120 institutions in 54 countries. Kew has advised many of these partners on how to set up and run seed banks for themselves. This has included, for example, the delivery of germination protocols to a network of 38 national seed banks in sub-Saharan Africa; and the use of seeds from 500 species stored in the MSB for restoration and species recovery programmes worldwide.

Which leads to a recommendation that Defra should pull out its wallet.

The MSB’s operating costs over the past nine years have averaged £4.1 million per annum. They were funded until the end of 2009 by the Millennium Commission. The external funding stream that has been going to the MSB to assist in the running costs ceased from January 2010 and Kew will now either have to fund the MSB from its own resources; seek alternative sources of funding, particularly by building the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership; or downsize or even close the MSB. For the reasons set out in Chapter 2, the review team believes the MSB should be of very high priority for Kew, and it recommends that Kew should be given additional interim funding by Defra, which tapers down over three years, to enable Kew to gather the additional funding support that it needs. We recommend that £3 million be given for this purpose in 2010/11 and £1.5 million in 2011/12.

This is not a particularly good time to make a call on the public finances in Britain, but surely the Millennium Seed Bank is too big — and important — to fail. Defra will no doubt find the money. And so they should.