There was no blogging from me last week because I was attending the 6th Session of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in Rome. You can read all about the week’s goings-on at IISD. Or wait until the formal report comes out. For what it’s worth, the two main impressions that I came away with are that the scope of the Multilateral System is likely to expand, though it will take a while, and that at some point, probably sooner, concerns about the dematerialization of plant genetic resources will have to be addressed in earnest.
The link takes me to the USC website, which mentions dematerialization in passing. The first time I came across `dematerialization’ was in Dr Bhatti’s report on the GB5 (I haven’t looked further): “First, the ‘dematerialization’ of the use of genetic resources. By this, I mean the increasing trend for the information and knowledge content of genetic material to be extracted, processed and exchanged in its own right, detached from the physical exchange of the plant genetic material: value is increasingly created at the level of the processing and use of such information and knowledge. The rise of modern breeding technologies and plant genomics, for example, has shifted the balance of value of material and knowledge. This raises a complex set of questions for the Treaty.” [IT/GB-5/13/Report Appendix 1.2].
USC also highlights what I see as a major failure of GB6 to address “…strong concerns about the funding and contributions of countries and industry into Benefits Sharing in terms of who contributes to Benefit Sharing Fund, why is it voluntary…”. GB6 kicked this into the long grass for GB7 (and then on). Another two years of no more sample movement and no more funds.
It is a bit rich that USC – closely associated with RAFI – complains about this. RAFI (now ETC) was part of the problem:- developing countries were being ripped off through `biopiracy’: multinationals were patenting genetic resource to the tune of billions of dollars and selling patented seed back to farmers. As a `tax on patents’ was used by the Treaty to generate cash via SMTAs, and as this has totally failed to produce any funding, the perhaps RAFI could apologize to developing countries for leading them astray (and also telling them to: `Ratify, ratify, ratify’ the dodgy Treaty 11 years ago).
Oh god. Dematerialization. Makes me thinking of some episodes of Doctor Who, which scared the hell out of me. Not related to IT, though.
Curators need to communicate common sense to users. Do I need to be scared?