I usually just peruse the sanet posts from the safety of the archives room,
but to me this thread seems so important that I just couldn't let it be cut
short (and my apologies if to the majority it seems like an old/cold
discussion as far as the list goes).
Dale wrote:
>>Okay, Okay! lets deal with this head on. If I am smart and organized
>>enough to come up with superior varieties, what is
>>wrong with my protecting them from people who would steal
>>them? Don't I have a right to earn a living?
Roberto replied:
>Yes, it is good to deal with this issue head on. What do you
>mean, steal them? You took the varieties from the public pool,
>didn't you? Once you release your breeding results, they're
>back to the public pool, and the public is entitled to use them.
>That's what all farmers have been doing. Earning a living has
>nothing to do with stealing from the public pool.
Dale replied:
>>Breeders take publicly available genetic resources and use them as >>raw
>>material to breed improved varieties. They do this by sexually
>> >>recombining existing varieties, often adding in exotic breeding
>> >>material from public collections. Hidden diversity is made manifest
>> >>by crossing and selfing. Finding the few genetic combinations that
>> >>are truly better than existing varieties is very difficult and
>> >>expensive.
>>Imagine dealing out hands of cards, but instead of a deck of 52, >>using a
>>deck of 52,000. So you deal out (with replacement), say, >>20,000 hands,
>>each with thousands of cards. only a very, very few of >>these are winning
>>hands. Each hand is analogous to a line produced >>by selfing the progeny
>>of a cross. You cannot just LOOK at the hand, >>you have to grow plots of
>>each one and compare its yield (and other >>agronomic properties) to
>>existing varieties to see if it is a >>winner. This is done at hundreds of
>>locations around the world to >>gain enough confidence in the comparisons,
>>and determine adaptation. >>This is a lot of work, and it is possible to
>>steal a variety.
>>So the varieties we come up with are truly new, not stolen from the
>> >>public pool. The resources, the raw material, is still there. Do you
>> >>want some of these varieties? you can get them from the USDA:
Dale's reasoning seems (as usual) fairly solid, but what is being proved?
That sexual recombination in plant breeding is difficult? Yes. That it is
expensive? OK. That it requires organization of people and across space?
Definitely.
That difficult, expensive, and complex necessitates privatization is I think
an unwarranted conclusion. That it was nevertheless held to be a conclusion
implicit in the argument is I think indicative of the box which tends to
limit our (U.S. citizens') thinking. Can we organize, pool resources, solve
difficult problems by means other than the market (politics comes to mind)?
And are there problems more appropriate to these 'other' means? Is the
discovery of new plant and animal varieties for food, medicine,
companionship (pets), etc. one of these problems?
Although it might be responded that individual rights are what's at stake
(Dale: 'if I (sic) am smart and organized enough'), and that these
individual rights are best respected by private ownership, I would object
again that the argument is based on status-quo assumptions, namely that the
public domain has already been defined as the raw material of the plant
breeder and does not extend to the results of her/his work. How to rethink
these assumptions? It seems to me that the notion of organization gets us
beyond a concrete individualism from the very beginning (what does it mean
to say 'I (sic) am organized enough'?), and along these same lines I would
venture that plant breeding is by 'nature' a collective process involving
generations of both human and plant individuals in which the question of
'ownership' should be dealt with very carefully.
As far as the rhetorical questions mentioned above, of course I have my
opinions, and I would refer both Dale and others to the literature on
collective/common pool resources for help in the formation of theirs: James
Acheson for the economically oriented or anything by Vandanna Shiva for
those ready for a radical challenge.
(Please note that I'm just on a short break from (academic) field-work and
won't be near a computer again for some time; i.e. I won't be able to reply
anytime soon to any further weaving of this thread).
Sincerely,
Matt Champagne
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