|
Post by rowan on Dec 4, 2013 13:51:38 GMT -5
Who thinks up these regulations? This will be a nightmare for both nurseries and gardeners. www.plantsforeurope.com/2013/11/new-european-commission-regulation-on-plant-reproductive-material/This is very interesting reading, here is a sample of the text: Quote: Current legislation allows growers and nurserymen to sell any ornamental plant variety by name if that variety is “common knowledge”. Common knowledge is taken (at least by the UK authorities) to mean any plant variety that has appeared in a catalogue, website, magazine or reference book with the variety name and some sort of brief description (which might be as short as “pink flowers in May, 30cm tall”). The new Regulation removes this possibility and requires that any named variety has an “officially recognised description” (ORD). The regulation says that the ORD must include the specific characteristics of the variety and make it identifiable. The UK trade, together with DEFRA, is of the opinion that the ORD will need to be a very detailed botanical description. For example, consider the lavender variety Hidcote – a very widely grown variety. It is one of more than 300 varieties of lavender that are sold in the UK. In order for the variety to be identifiable from the ORD, the ORD would need to include details as small as the size and colour of the hairs on the leaf.
|
|
|
Post by steev on Dec 4, 2013 14:18:31 GMT -5
Too many rats in the maze; not enough white-collar cheese to go around. People have to get creative to justify their cut.
My brother works for the local gas/electric monopoly as a field inspector; he's hoping to move up to a supervisor position (more money/less outdoor work). The thing is, big companies like this need to promote people, so supervisors become managers, who have to have enough supervisors to manage so that their job looks important on paper, but there just aren't enough field workers to be supervised. This results in an over-abundance of supervisors, so they may have a very light workload (that's the cheese my brother is looking for). Of course, the potential downside of this is that in the event of a need to trim the payroll, these are the rats that go to the snakes.
|
|
|
Post by ilex on Dec 6, 2013 17:36:52 GMT -5
They'll try to do the same as with vegetables, make everybody pay to get into the list. Those that are small or sell strange things get cut out of the system.
|
|
|
Post by blueadzuki on Dec 6, 2013 19:47:25 GMT -5
It's actually going to be a little more dire than even that, I think. Going by what happened with veggies, once the ORD is written, in order for a variety to be sold every plant of that variety will have to match that ORD EXACTLY. In other words, the ORD holotype will become the one and only version of the plant permitted; every example of that plant will have to be more or less a clone of that one to be legal. That means that even if someone WAS willing to pay to get something with a bit of genetic diversity on the list, it wouldn't be allowed. No more landraces or gentic diversity; the EU has made it very clear they want everything to be as genetically uniform as possible.
|
|
|
Post by ilex on Dec 7, 2013 4:49:16 GMT -5
Just like vegetables, many old varieties are impossible to list.
There was that story of a very popular cuc that had stem hairs of two colours and got its listing denied.
This law will give control to a small bunch of big companies.
|
|
|
Post by blueadzuki on Dec 7, 2013 6:58:54 GMT -5
Even some of the fairly big companies may have problems. One bit about that cucumber story that often slips through the cracks is that the primary company that was IN FAVOR of offering it was Thompson and Morgan, and they presumaby name among the "big companies"
|
|
|
Post by ilex on Dec 8, 2013 4:20:53 GMT -5
Yes, it was its most popular cuc there. Anyway, big guys don't get hurt as much as smaller ones. It's those that sell obscure, low volume varieties that get the hardest hit. Big guys can try to register things if volume is high enough.
Why go to a small obscure company if they sell the same big guys do? Most competition will vanish, and after a while, almost nobody will ask for those varieties they don't know about.
This is mostly about market control, at a high cost.
|
|