Over at Project Syndicate Chee Yoke Ling & Edward Hammond write:
Four hundred years ago, John Rolfe used tobacco seeds pilfered from the West Indies to develop Virginia’s first profitable export, undermining the tobacco trade of Spain’s Caribbean colonies. More than 200 years later, another Briton, Henry Wickham, took seeds for a rubber-bearing tree from Brazil to Asia – via that great colonialist institution, London’s Royal Botanic Gardens – thereby setting the stage for the eventual demise of the Amazonian rubber boom.
At a time of unregulated plant exports, all it took was a suitcase full of seeds to damage livelihoods and even entire economies. Thanks to advances in genetics, it may soon take even less...[more]
