Mmmmmm, and msembryanthumums - bung one up please Subbie - technicolour darlings I have had in my garden....(South African daisies)
Yes, GENETIC RESOURCES is the buzzword...
Do you know about the global seedbanks run by the UN since the 1940s and '50s? Such as IPGRIs (International Plant Genetic Resource Institutes) and CIGAR? These institutes have been attempting to collect valuable germplasm and genetic resources which have been freely given between states so that the major world crops can be kept healthy thru recombination/breeding....that is ONE GOOD REASON why it is important to preserve biodiversity because our food safety relies on our crops remaining healthy - some of the stories concerning the race to save major cereals and other staples from diseases have been a result of the international seed banks - imagine trying to save an important crop knowing that out in the world there probably is a resistant genetic sequence that if bred/developed into the seed at risk will confer resistance....and it happens all the time because CIGAR and others have huge stocks - so as with many rice stories, they save the crop with a gene from another rice strain collected elsewhere (hooray!) maybe thousands of miles away and save the day and lives....and they haven't had to use genetic engineering in the past to do it...
and of course plants for medicines - 80% of the world relies on traditional herbal medicines - but that is arguing for saving species for instrumental (human-centred ) reasons...
Obviously the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is the major global means by which biological diversity can also be preserved in situ, but the UN have also attempted to preserve biological diversity and traditional knowledge associated with 'citizen science' practised by peasants/tribes/third and fourth world farmers and shamen, through WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organisation.
WIPO is an attempt to set up a 'regime' (a set of soft laws, hard laws and practices) whereby certain cultural products such as arts, textiles, music, and interestingly genetic resources such as plants, can become the 'intellectual property' of those communities who develo[ped them. It is, of course, outrageous that multinational seed companies can come to a country (or the seedbanks), extract genetic resources and sequences and then patent those 'useful' sequences. As you know, landraces of important primary products such as potatoes (swooon the Andes), wheat/sativa, rice (India has about 3-7000 varieties of rice) have been developed over hundreds and thousands of years (see Vavilov) and yet there have been serious attempts by MNCs to patent those products preventing local people from using the seeds because they risk infringing patent rights (see the fuss in India over Neem...)
HOWEVER - I am slightly wary of patenting/IPRs as the way for conserving genetic resources because it appears to encourage capital appropriation of genetic resources - many tribes and farmers (of which the global majority may be women) have traditionally swapped seeds with one another in order to preserve genetic diversity and integrity of their crops and thus prevent disease. If you look at the countries in which blood donation has become a business and people are paid for it you find that they have much worse problems that i societies where blood is freely donated within some welfare state...therefore, in a global capitalist system the penetration of agriculture and pastoralism with capital means that resource relationships are changed in potentially harmful ways.
To my mind, biological science has become a potentially radical epistemological tool by which I mean that genetic research has shown us that we share most of our DNA with the apes and other animals, that morphology is exceedingly unimportant and malluable within the genetic code accounting for a very tiny set of sequences (yet we all seem to judge on appearances!), ands that essentially we are all symbiotic with one another in the recent past or present...therefore, biology should be utilised as a political and ethical means to ensure that we do not hurt nonhuman life because they are part of our world and they should have some intrinsic value - because whatever you use to try and distinguish human from nonhuman life such as rationality, or 'knowing the word of god', or some genetic differentiation, it doesn't work (I won't digress here but if you wanna know more..)..
BUT what you have at present is biology used in the pursuit of a profit and 'capital accumulation' - whilst in situ genetic resources are being depleted biotechnologists are instructed to create new genetic resources/sequences ex situ within the laboratory - which can then be patented WHILE IN SITU BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY AND GENETIC RESOURCES ARE BEING LOST - ITS STUPID!!!!! - Leave life alone!!
And its absolutely schizophrenic - lets spend millions and billions of cash on creating new genetic resources while we're losing in situ biological diversity (see UN Red Book Lists)
So, biology has been usurped as a radical liberatory tool that can help create a more harmonious world for human and nonhuman life by the pursuit of capital, profit motive, and the desire for intellectual property rights....biology can help us to see we're all related but what some people are trying to do is to appropriate that knowledge in the pursuit of profit...in the UK when you train to be a biologist at PhD level they give you classes in intellectual property so you know, either for the public or private sector, how to recognise potentially profitable sequences or processes (you can patent either) and then get patenting - forget using that knowledge as part of an agenda to help the planet - 'wealth creation' is of more utility to society at present or certainly easier to achieve - and biologists CAN become exceedingly rich if they hit the right seam...but as I say, it is up to biologists to make their ethical decisions - and many are vocal about the appropriation of life by capital
As you might have seen this week, the UK govt has tried to ban fox hunting which, if successful, should be seen as an historic milestone in an 'ever-expanding concept of rights' - in other historical times women and black people have not been regarded as fully human and not accorded their rights - but as the circle of rights expands other groups will become included - and nonhuman life is next - after that will hopefully be ecosystems...
I know that conservation ecology has been going thru an interesting theoretical reflexive period at present with a questioning of the role of local people in conservation practices - many of these people have been kept out of the 'development/conservation' process - like Leakey wanting to shoot local poachers - but some of the current thinking about African conservation is arguing that the African environment is naturally unstable and subject, historically, to anthropogenic and environmental pressures whereby crops and ecosystems have become stressed and degraded - but the suggestion is is that this is a natural state of African savannas etc...the people then move on while the land recovers...
but it is interesting that stress might be a natural feature of African environments. This view then leads to a reappraisal of the role of local communities in their environment and allows the parameters for 'harm'/degradation of land by local communities to be expanded.. Indeed, the current argument suggests that very recent paradigms of conservation have been a result of a 'colonial science' that has viewed land and ecosystems in an instrumental manner and ignored local people's traditional knowledge...it is interesting to think that African environmental histories may be a 'natural' cycle of boom and bust!
But land rights are so bound up with colonialism and neo-colonialism in Africa - SA property is being heavily marketed in the UK now - land is cheap and tourism/holiday homes/ and business places are now regarded as acceptable - I do want to talk about land rights abit more but I'm running out of time -
I know you dislike Mugabe but it took them 20 years to start widescale 'land reform' there and it will always be a contentious issue - 70% of land owned by 10(?) % of the population? Leaving aside the democracy issue (difficult I know) the land issue is THE issue for them as a recently freed state.
But in Azania I just hope the rainbow alliance is green too
