There’s a strange little article on SciDevNet about the petition lodged with the UN by Norman Warthmann, of the Australian National University, and Claudio Chiarolla, of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in France, “to create a legal framework requiring governments to make data from the genetic sequencing of plants freely available.”
Strange for three reasons. One, why not make more of an explicit connection with DivSeek, which is trying to work through exactly these issues and was the subject of another article on the same website a few months ago?
Two, why link to a pdf of the text of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, when said instrument has a perfectly nice website?
And three, somebody should really have checked this chart of germplasm transfers under the International Treaty, because most of the “countries” listed are not countries at all, but in fact the international centres housed by Mexico (CIMMYT), the Philippines (IRRI) etc.
The international genebanks managed by the CGIAR Centres are by far the largest contributors to germplasm flows under the International Treaty, which is not something you’d be able to gather from this without a lot more background and context.
Luigi: The `somebody’ who should have checked the figures is the ITPGRFA Secretariat: these are their figures. Your final paragraph indicates a vast problem with the Treaty: why are most developing countries, deeply dependent as they are on introduced crops, playing `dog-in-the-manger’ and not distributing genetic resources to other countries where said genetic resources could be more useful?