|
 Enquiries SEED News - sept/oct 2004
|
|
This section is coordinated by the professors from the Federal University of Pelotas-Brazil, with the objective of answering the inquiries sent by the readers.
Send your question to e-mail: silmar@seednews.inf.br
I'd like to know, what the piracy really means in the seed business. I have heard that it is one of the biggest problem, not just only about seeds, but other products too.
Concerning to seeds, in the countries that have a cultivar protection law, every person who wishes to merchandise a protected cultivar, must have a permission from who created the material (obtainer), on a common language, the person has to pay something. The piracy, consist on merchandise the protected cultivar without permission from the obtainer. In Brazil, there are clues that this type of merchandise is decreasing, due to the numerous arrests occurred, mainly with soybean and wheat. There are specialized lawyers, who are prepared to instruct the processes characterizing piracy.
In the tropical and subtropical conditions, the soybean seeds are harvested in a period of time which the temperature is over 25 ēC. Considering that this can affect seed quality. What can be done to minimize this inconvenience?
In fact, the temperature is one of the factors that affects most seed quality, thus, the seed producer looks for alternatives to cool his seeds. One of the best alternatives is to pass cool air through the seed. In a few hours it is possible to cool from 30 ēC to15 ēC, which provides a high seed storage potential. One of the new advances of this process is to cool the seeds while they are in the bagging bin, allowing the seeds to be stored with a low temperature.
First, were the hybrid seeds. Now, there are seeds with special characteristics to the industry, to health and to field management that have a great value. Please, comment about what has been done to maximize the production of these seeds.
In the last years, the seed production has advanced a lot. At these days, those that are in the business, are the ones that have professionalized themselves. As the production cost has raised and not everything can be transferred to the seeds, the producers had to invest on yield technology, conditioning and strong partnership. One of the advances that can be commented, is in seed conditioning, which has improved its efficiency, through new equipments and reducing losses. In soybean, it was common to lose 30% in average, today these losses are at 20% in average. This is mainly, due to better trained personal.
I recently have heard on a speech, that the weight compensation for low quality seeds, is a alternative that we have to avoid. I didn´t understand so well, can you explain it to me?
One of the attributes of physiological seed quality is its germination potencial, characteristic used in all over the world on the market. However, a 50Kg seed bag with 100% germination will have a superior performance than two 50Kg bags with 50% germination. That is due to problems with seed distribution at the moment of sowing, knowing that the seeds with 50% germination will not have uniformity of germination on time and space. All this, without consider that bags with 50% germination, will probably have a field emergence a lot lower than the germination percentage.
Plant protection, which brought the private sector to strong investments on plant breeding, has been proving to be a great tool to dispose to farmers, high quality seeds of the improved cultivars. However, I constantly hear that the best protection would be for the countries to adopt the 1991 UPOV convention. I´d like to have more information about this subject.
The UPOV has practically two conventions, the one of 1978 and the other of 1991, which the main difference from one to another, is that the in first one the farmer can save his own seed without paying anything to the breeder. While in the convention of 1991, the protection goes until the grain, it means that if the farmer resolves to storage his own seeds, he still has to pay something to the breeder. The system of Colombia and Bolivia deserves special comments, where the quantity of seed allowed to be saved by the farmer is limited, even though adopting the 1978 UPOV convention. Most of the countries that use the 1978 convention, do not limit the use of farmer saved seed, causing deep distortions on the seed market, specially in big areas.
I'd like to know which is the size of the sample to be used to analyze transgenic material. This is becoming a routine in seed labs.
In the case of seeds, it is recommended to use the sampling procedures that have been used for germination and purity tests, which can be found in the rules for testing seeds. Specifically, related to the sample size, this will depend on the tolerance. However, it seems to be by convention, that the sample has to be so big in order to have at least one contaminant. Thus, for a tolerance of 0.1% the working sample should be of 1000 seeds.
|
|
............
|
