3 Replies to “Call for US ratification of Seed Treaty”
Who cares? I’ve just been clearing out some old files – including one I got many years ago from a RAFI insider. From this, apparently the USA didn’t like the UNEP/CBD system one little bit and decided a Treaty under FAO might be better. Wrong call. I paid for myself to visit Beltsville to argue with USDA that the CBD changed very little for the bits that worked – the CG, the USDA, and genebanks in developed countries. “If it ain’t bust, don’t fix it” – there was no need for a Treaty. It is the same bits that are keeping the Treaty afloat so the Treaty changed little over the CBD except to stop the movement of new collections out of very many developing countries. The USA ratifying the Treaty will not change that. Twenty years after the CBD and ten years after the Treaty some new thinking is needed on access and benefit-sharing. For starters, FAO was not – as claimed – asked to sort things out by the CBD Nairobi Final Act (3.4). It was the `Global System’ – including IBPGR and the CGIAR (actually the working bits rather than the lawyers). But the 27th FAO Conference (para. 106) started the race to the bottom.
I think Dave is probably correct more or less. However something in what he wrote prompted me to go through the archives and check what we were commenting on back in the 1980s. Mike Jackson and I drafted this: Plant Gene Conservation (1986) Nature 319:615).
And probably more significantly: Plant gene banks at risk (1984) Nature 308:683.
The only thing I disagree with now is the value of in situ conservation – Erna Bennett was not wrong!
Brian: Thanks. Erna Bennett was right about something else, too.
On January 13th 2012 Jeremy flagged here the wonderful and dismissive comment by Erna Bennett in 2002 on the ITPGRFA: “Introducing its recommendations, the 1967 Conference on Genetic Resources in Rome said, `it is deemed a national and international obligation to discover, conserve and make available the world’s plant genetic resources to all who at local, national or international level may profit man by their access to them.’ Yet almost forty years later access to genetic resources is more restricted than it ever was.” She also wrote “The Treaty was described as `weak,’ but it is not at all weak. From its beginnings this agreement set out to promote the interests of the powerful, and it has done so.”
The problem for all of us now is that Erna’s perception about the `interests of the powerful’ was spot-on. The response of the weak and the not-so-weak – developing countries maintaining genetic resources in-situ – has been to deny access to these resources over the past decade. To the extent that Erna’s perception was right, the lock-down on sample movement was predictable. So we have wasted twelve years digging rather than climbing out of the hole.
But is Congress listening?
Who cares? I’ve just been clearing out some old files – including one I got many years ago from a RAFI insider. From this, apparently the USA didn’t like the UNEP/CBD system one little bit and decided a Treaty under FAO might be better. Wrong call. I paid for myself to visit Beltsville to argue with USDA that the CBD changed very little for the bits that worked – the CG, the USDA, and genebanks in developed countries. “If it ain’t bust, don’t fix it” – there was no need for a Treaty. It is the same bits that are keeping the Treaty afloat so the Treaty changed little over the CBD except to stop the movement of new collections out of very many developing countries. The USA ratifying the Treaty will not change that. Twenty years after the CBD and ten years after the Treaty some new thinking is needed on access and benefit-sharing. For starters, FAO was not – as claimed – asked to sort things out by the CBD Nairobi Final Act (3.4). It was the `Global System’ – including IBPGR and the CGIAR (actually the working bits rather than the lawyers). But the 27th FAO Conference (para. 106) started the race to the bottom.
I think Dave is probably correct more or less. However something in what he wrote prompted me to go through the archives and check what we were commenting on back in the 1980s. Mike Jackson and I drafted this: Plant Gene Conservation (1986) Nature 319:615).
And probably more significantly: Plant gene banks at risk (1984) Nature 308:683.
The only thing I disagree with now is the value of in situ conservation – Erna Bennett was not wrong!
Brian: Thanks. Erna Bennett was right about something else, too.
On January 13th 2012 Jeremy flagged here the wonderful and dismissive comment by Erna Bennett in 2002 on the ITPGRFA: “Introducing its recommendations, the 1967 Conference on Genetic Resources in Rome said, `it is deemed a national and international obligation to discover, conserve and make available the world’s plant genetic resources to all who at local, national or international level may profit man by their access to them.’ Yet almost forty years later access to genetic resources is more restricted than it ever was.” She also wrote “The Treaty was described as `weak,’ but it is not at all weak. From its beginnings this agreement set out to promote the interests of the powerful, and it has done so.”
The problem for all of us now is that Erna’s perception about the `interests of the powerful’ was spot-on. The response of the weak and the not-so-weak – developing countries maintaining genetic resources in-situ – has been to deny access to these resources over the past decade. To the extent that Erna’s perception was right, the lock-down on sample movement was predictable. So we have wasted twelve years digging rather than climbing out of the hole.