Basil instinct

I don’t know much about Thai cooking. So when I came across a “furore” (no less) over some new varieties of something called holy basil, apparently an important ingredient in that country’s cuisine, my first reaction was to wonder whether the whole thing was a joke.

It wasn’t. Holy basil turns out to be Ocimum tenuiflorum, but, unlike the plant itself, the type of controversy it has engendered is a fairly familiar one to me.

CPRAM, a subsidiary of Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Group, has secured protection for four new varieties developed for its ready-meal business. The protection was registered in 2024 and runs until 2036. It doesn’t amount to ownership of holy basil: farmers remain free to grow, save and trade traditional varieties, and only commercial propagation of the protected ones needs permission. That has not stopped worries about Thailand’s plant variety protection law, especially the prospect of a move to the stricter UPOV 1991.

The crop itself is more interesting than the argument. It is clearly something I should have known about. It is widely cultivated and culturally important in SE Asia, though its genetic diversity is less well documented than its medicinal properties. An Indian study of 38 accessions found that 91% of the measured molecular variation lay between accessions rather than between geographical regions. Another study of 109 Indian accessions found considerable differences in plant architecture, leaf and seed characteristics, flowering time and essential-oil content. For Thailand, researchers looked at 20 landraces and five commercial cultivars and found substantial variation, with both groups spread across two broad genetic clusters. They did warn that rising demand and farmers’ liking for commercial cultivars could eventually erode local diversity, though they saw no cause for immediate alarm.

There is also more in genebanks than I initially guessed. A search of Genesys turns up 163 accessions, 67 of them from Thailand. Of the total, 82 are listed as available through the Multilateral System of the Plant Treaty, mostly via the World Vegetable Center. Holy basil isn’t an Annex I crop, so those listings are voluntary. Anyone getting material that way signs the Standard Material Transfer Agreement, which includes benefit-sharing obligations if a commercial product incorporates it and isn’t freely available for further research and breeding.

Holy basil was being tended in household gardens and temple courtyards long before anyone thought of registering a variety. Whatever comes of the IPR row, that accumulated diversity is worth protecting. And I want to grow some too.