Rather than “too good to be true”, this scheme is too obvious to happen. Stakeholders, public or private, do due diligence, especially if the “flagship project”, “demonstration case” or “experiment” runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. This is of public concern.
That’s from Prof. Joseph Henry Vogel in reply to a recent(ish) post on decoupled ABS for PGRFA. Read the whole critique here.
Too obvious? This is old hat. I was brought in by FAO to comment on the Final Draft of the CBD. Hidden in a sub-clause of a sub-clause was just this idea: `tax plant breeding to conserve pandas’ sort of thing. FAO was appaled at the brass neck but then decided it could be a large earner for FAO if they got their own Treaty, which they then did (the ITPGRFA), strongly promoted by NGOs and stongly rubbished by me. The FAO Treaty too failed, not only in not generating income for FAO but, disasterously, almost stopping the international flow of germplasm (except via the CGIAR). The people invoved went on to greater things (advising the US Government and the Agroecology Fund in Washington DC). The massive value of introduced crops (depending on germplasm exchange) was ignored. Countries shot themselves in the foot.