FEBRUARY 2018 SEEDWORLD.COM / 81 administrative PVR system and its enforcement. The signature of the said AA follows the adoption by the Forty-First Session of the Administrative Council of ARIPO on Nov. 20, 2017 held in Lilongwe, the Republic of Malawi, of the Regulations for the Implementation of the Arusha Protocol for the protec- tion of New Varieties of Plants. The agreement will have an initial duration of five years as from the date of signa- ture. The CPVO and the ARIPO may decide to review the cooperation activities deployed under this AA and to evaluate their implemen- tation. The evaluation may include identifying areas in which cooperation should be strengthened, improved, suspended or terminated and new areas for joint action. STATUS INDIA The National Seeds Association of India (NSAI) is unhappy with the recent announcements made by the Maharashtra agriculture minister with regard to seed companies. The minister had announced that seed supplier companies shall compensate farmers for the losses incurred due to pink bollworm. NSAI director-general Kalyan Goswami said that seed com- panies are only responsible for seed quality parameters as specified under the Seeds Act. “In case of BT cotton seeds supplied in Maharashtra there is no problem with seed quality. No complaints are made by any farmer about seed quality,” he clarified in a statement issued in Pune. “It is a clear case of failure of Monsanto Bt II technology which is called as Bollgard II. The Central Institute of Cotton Research (CICR) had declared the fact that Pink bollworms developed resistance two years ago and accordingly, all seed companies had edu- cated farmers about this and even issued newspaper adver- tisements,” Goswami said. STATUS ISRAEL ADAMA, a leading global crop protection company, and ALRISE Biosystems, a drug- delivery company focused on advanced microencapsu- lation of active ingredients, announced the signature of an R&D agreement to develop new innovative and sustainable crop protection products with ALRISE’s proprietary ImSus® encapsulation technology. Through this partnership, ADAMA and ALRISE aim to deliver new, highly effective crop protection products to farmers with a lower dose of active ingredients. “ALRISE has been active in the field of pharmaceuticals for more than 16 years. The collaboration with ADAMA opens a whole new range of applications,” stated Dr. Volker Rindler, ALRISE’s Managing Director. “We are pleased to offer our technol- ogy to a world leader in the agrochemical field and to contribute to developing inno- vative and sustainable crop protection products to meet the demand for more environ- mentally friendly solutions,” Dr. Heiko Seemann, ALRISE’s Managing Director, added. STATUS NETHERLANDS NRGene, the worldwide leader in genomic assem- bly and analysis, is working with a team of researchers from Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherlands and leading commercial partners to create multi-genome mapping of commercial food potatoes. Potatoes are the fourth most consumed food crop in the world, reaching €11 billion in global trade. The potato genome is complex. It’s an auto-tetraploid, which means that each potato cell contains four nearly identical copies of each chromosome and gene, making the assembly and phasing of the four copies extremely difficult for tradi- tional technologies. NRGene has completed the phased assembly of three commercial potato varieties. The assembly is built of scaf- folds with an N50 of 1.19 Mbp, less than 0.89% unfilled gaps, and BUSCO results of 96.25%, 86% of which are found in more than one copy. SW Congratulations to JOE BUTWIN on his retirement! Quality Seed Since 1881 After 23 years of dedicated service to Stokes Seeds, Joe Butwin, US Sales Manager is celebrating a much deserved retirement. The staff at Stokes and its suppliers would like to wish Joe all the best, he will be dearly missed.