From 3 till 7 May, the UPOV Technical Working Party for Vegetables took place. Not in Antalya, Turkey, but online. Naktuinbouw colleague Marian van Leeuwen presided over the meeting for the first time.
On the agenda were the necessary revisions of guidelines
Naktuinbouw led the revisions of tomato, tomato rootstock, pepper, lettuce and rocket. Tomato and peppers will be continued next year, the others will offered to the Technical Commission (TC) in October for decision-making. With such a revision, the guideline is in line with the needs of the DUS test.
New characteristics are added (such as no-gel in tomato) if they are now distinctive due to developments in breeding. Some characteristics are deleted because they are labor-intensive (such as tomato shelf-life) or add little to distinctness. Each time it is about harmonisation: if all UPOV countries describe the same characteristics in the same way, it is easy to read each other's variety descriptions or to take-over reports.
There was discussion about resistance characteristics
For us, these are often characteristics that give a lot of distinctness between varieties and thus contribute to the efficiency of the DUS test. We are therefore happy to give them the status 'mandatory'. But in other countries it can be impossible to test varieties, because for example the disease does not occur there or because control varieties are poorly available. We try to make our position as clear as possible.
We need to be careful with diseases that do not give a black and white result, but where the symptoms vary in a sliding scale from very weak to very strong. We will also discuss this with other countries after this meeting.
How to proceed?
An important topic was also: how should we proceed? Do we continue to meet online, or – if we can meet live again – is a combination desired? To have more experts 'at the table', it can be valuable to do certain parts of the meeting online. However, we do see the live coffee breaks as an important lubricant for networking. |
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