Resources Part II

With so much information, it can be tough to stay as current as we'd all like.  Though there are times I'd prefer to bury my head in the sand....my hope is that social bookmarking can be a useful tool in keeping abreast of timely industry trends.  I envision using the tool to cut down on my emails and visiting diigo when convenient instead.  Currently, I receive many industry and local business news emails to my personal and professional emails in addition to scanning Twitter and my beloved, personalized Google News site.  On top of that, I am part of several Community SharePoint sites at work where we share and discuss relevant news articles.   So I'm trying a new way of consuming information in an effort to cut down on emails and avoid visiting so many sites each day.  For me this means setting up bookmarks for Ag and Nutrition News, Marketing News and General Business News.  We'll see if this new system is more efficient.  I’ll continue adding to my library, but check out the following list aggregated here which includes the following (thus far):

Ag and Nutrition News

·         Global Harvest Initiative

·         Biotechnology Industry Organization

Marketing News

·         Fast Company

·         Technorati

General Business News

·         Harvard Business Review

·         Des Moines Business Record

Original image from Weighty Matters here

Resources

RSS feeds are a helpful way to stay on top of industry news, a few I like include:

·         Global Harvest Initiative

·         CropLife International

·         Roger Thurow’s The Last Hunger Season

·         UK’s Intellectual Property Organization

·         Patent Baristas

·         The IP Kat

·         World Intellectual Property Organization

I appreciate that RSS feeds also provide a great way to do research on new policies and advances in the agriculture industry.  If you have others  to share, please let me know and check out these resources on one page by viewing my Ag & IP dashboard.

The importance of education to enable efficient technology development and/or borrowing

I really enjoyed Anne-Clare Hervy's recent post on  Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) reports covering human and institutional capacity strengthening. The first is focused on African higher education, looking at the challenges faced on the continent with recommendations for future investment. The second, is focused on long-term training in agriculture and how best to leverage individual training for institutional development.

Hervey helpfully lays out a brief history on higher education capacity building to date and discusses what has and has not been holistically effective.  The necessity for long-term training in agriculture to ensure existing best practices are implemented is clear and the APLU reports are an important step forward in how institutions can best provide thoughtful external assistance.

Why agriculture IP protection is an important component to feeding a growing world population

The United Census Bureau expects world population to grow to 9 billion people by 2050.  We are facing an increasing number of global challenges, including limited land and water resources for cultivating food and feed crops, the threat of global climate change, pest pressure, and changing diets.

Given that arable land is a fixed value, we will need to continue to develop innovative methods of producing more food on the same amount of land.  Intellectual property protections spur the necessary research and development to advance new seed products that yield more food on the same amount of land; get more crop per drop (more yield with less water); grow in adverse conditions; and are more pest and disease resistant.

Farmers in countries that have intellectual property protections and technology transfer frameworks enjoy greater access to new seed products.  With intellectual property protections, companies not only invest in developing locally-adapted products and varieties but also develop partnerships that include training, knowledge transfer, and information sharing.  With protection, product developers make their innovations publicly known and available (through licensing).  This becomes a building block for technology transfer, new research and development, and incremental advances in new seed products.

More on the basics of intellectual property protection is covered by Derek Slater at CSO Online

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