… there was a long discussion of some important minutiae concerning the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, all occasioned by a little footnote in a learned paper. The footnote sought to “point out the tensions involved” in “motivations for distributing multilateral system PGRFA to non-ITPGRFA members”.
Lovers of alphabet soup will find much there to feast on, as will historians of the Treaty and its antecedents. Thanks to all who contributed. A nagging counterfactual remains: would there have been that much discussion had the footnote been incorporated in the body of the paper? I guess we’ll never know.
Jeremy: Hold on – that’s not quite a precis of the discussion. The `learned paper’ suggests that three years after the Treaty came into operation the CGIAR (capriciously?) decided to distribute samples to non-ratifiers of the Treaty. That is simply not so. For several decades pre-dating the Treaty the CGIAR had an absolute policy of distributing samples very widely indeed. Anyone negotiating or ratifying the Treaty should have known this (or been told by the CG negotiators who had been delegated to do this under the `Serageldin Principles’ of 1994 that removed policy over the CG collections from the Centres to IPGRI or whatever they were called at the time). The Centres simply kept on doing what they had to do, something on which global food security depends, especially for those 140 countries more than 50% dependent for their crop production on germplasm introduced from other continents.
This look back (in anger by me) is not just of interest to historians but to all who are now trying to rescue the Treaty from oblivion. We need to learn from past mistakes and do a much better job next time. Blaming the Centres for problems caused by others – as the learned paper attempted – is not going to help.