Issues & Analysis
A new global treaty to ensure food security
A new global treaty which
aims to ensure food security through the conservation,
exchange and sustainable use of plant genetic resources was
roughly agreed to on 1 July 2001 at the UN Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. But a number of
crucial issues are still unresolved. These will have to be
dealt with in November at a high-level meeting that will
assess progress since the World Food Summit that was held five
years ago. At stake is whether the world's agricultural
biodiversity is nurtured to provide private gains for a few or
food security for all.
The International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources for
Food and Agriculture (IU) has been under negotiation for the
past seven years. An earlier voluntary version of the IU had
been agreed to by the member states of FAO back in 1981,
framing genetic resources as a common heritage of humanity
which needs to be protected from further erosion and loss. But
that agreement was overrun by the new political reality of the
Convention on Biological Diversity, which reframed genetic
resources as national sovereignty and linked access to these
resources with the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits
from them. The underlying objective of the IU -- to ensure the
continued availability of genetic resources for food and
agriculture -- has not changed in those twenty years. It has
only become more urgent.
The new IU will be a legally-binding treaty with its own
governing body. Its overall focus encompasses all plant
genetic resources for food and agriculture. But its core
provisions on "access" and "benefit sharing" will apply to a
specific list of crops. The genetic resources of those crops
will be pooled into a "multilateral system" that will operate
under IU rules.
Although the text of the new Undertaking was roughly finalised
last week, there are still a number of crucial issues that
remain in brackets, not yet agreed to. The most important ones
are: whether and to what extent monopolistic intellectual
property rights (IPRs) can be applied to genetic materials
accessed through the multilateral system; and the relationship
between the IU and other international agreements, most
notably the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreement on
Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.
The main lines
The new IU basically establishes the following:
· The contracting parties will make specific efforts to
conserve and promote the good use of genetic resources for
food and agriculture. Good use includes agricultural policies
that don't undermine biodiversity and support for the role of
farmers.
· The IU provides for a multilateral system that sets common
rules for access to, and the sharing of benefits from, crop
genetic resources. This system applies only to a specific list
of crops -- some 35 as of now. This list can grow if parties
agree, but the crops that fall outside the list will be
treated bilaterally on a case-by-case basis according to the
provisions of the Convention on Biodiversity.
· Access to genetic resources under the IU will be
multilateral. In other words, countries commit all materials
of the agreed crops into a common pot that parties can then
draw from under the same rules.
· Financial benefits from the use of IU-governed genetic
resources will be shared through a compulsory mechanism that
draws on the revenues generated from their commercialisation.
· Whether and to what extent the multilateral system will
allow for intellectual property rights on genetic materials in
the common pot is still undecided. The current text is in
brackets, leaving the possibility wide open.
· Farmers' rights, in the meantime, will be promoted
internationally but subject to national law (such as the
prohibition to save seed if the seeds are protected at the
national level by IPR).
The watering down process
As often happens in the course of such negotiations, a number
of OECD countries led by the United States managed to insert
some last minute changes in the text that could make the IU
less effective and less comprehensive:
· Only those genetic resources that are in the public domain
will be subject to the rules of the multilateral system.
Companies and other private holders of crop germplasm are
merely ''invited'' to contribute the materials they maintain.
In essence, this allows private entities to parasite the
system.
· The requirement to share financial benefits only applies if
the recipient of the multilateral germplasm limits access to
the genetic product he or she sells. Furthermore, this
benefit-sharing can be realised through individual contractual
agreements -- not necessarily based on new national
legislation -- which could turn it into an unworkable and
untraceable system.
· The current list of crops to which the multilateral system
will apply is ridiculously small. If the treaty is to
seriously contribute to food security, it has to apply to many
more crops and not only the major commodities.
· The implementation of the IU, and any follow-up action that
countries might want to develop under it, will be governed by
consensus. In practice, this means that any country can veto
any proposal and potentially block the meaningful execution of
the treaty.
Despite the successful efforts to weaken the text during the
final days of negotiation last week, the new treaty with its
governing body is probably a good thing to have. As the
multilateral system is meant to facilitate a wide exchange of
crop germplasm -- and to fairly share the benefits from it --
it could help prevent a "Wild West" scenario of purely
bilateral wheeling-and-dealing from completely taking over.
The governing body that will manage the Undertaking, and the
multilateral system, should provide a political platform where
issues related to crop genetic resources can be dealt with
openly at the international level. Everybody, but especially
farmers at the local level in need of continued access to
agricultural biodiversity, stands to win from such a system.
However, whether these laudable functions will actually
materialise depends to a great extent on two things. One is
whether the treaty will be able to effectively stop the
further privatisation of genetic resources through IPRs. The
other is whether the IU will manage to hold its own ground
against the imposition of other rules and agreements, such as
those implemented by the WTO, that ruthlessly prioritise
commercial and international trade interests over and above
agriculture and local food security. These are precisely the
two issues that are still outstanding and hanging in brackets.
Final showdown at November's food security summit
"The treaty fails in many respects," Patrick Mulvany of the
UK's Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) said at
the closing the negotiating session last weekend. "It is not
fair: although Farmers' Rights are recognised, they will be
subordinate to national laws protecting the plant breeding
industry. It is not equitable: mandatory benefits returned to
farmers in developing countries through this treaty will be a
minuscule fraction of the food industry's US$2 trillion annual
turnover. And it is not comprehensive: it will apply to a mere
34 food crops and a derisory 29 forages."
We agree. The IU only weakly reflects the expectations and
demands that over 400 civil society organisations from 60
countries put on the table. But the real test for the treaty
still is to come.
Countries now have to decide whether the IU will prohibit
intellectual property on the "parts and components" of the
materials shared from the common pot. If it does, then the
treaty will contribute to ensure the continued availability of
genetic resources for further breeding, and will become a
milestone in the struggle for sustainable and
biodiversity-based agriculture. If it does not, then the IU
will contribute to the further privatisation of biodiversity
and will be seen rather as an international "undertaker" for
plant genetic resources. Because it would then create a
legally-binding system that removes biodiversity further away
from the control of farmers themselves. It would allow
powerful corporations to privatise the shared germplasm and
enhance genetic erosion. No developing country will want to
contribute genetic resources to a mechanism that allows the
materials to be siphoned off as intellectual monopolies in the
North. It would be both destructive and wrong.
The final showdown will take place during the first week of
November in Rome, when the FAO Conference meets to take stock
of how far things have come five years after the World Food
Summit of 1996. At that gathering, the final version of the IU
is due to be negotiated, adopted and signed. We expect that
unless there is strong public pressure to push the IU in the
right direction, then the commercial interests pushing it in
the opposite direction could very well prevail.
For more details:
www.grain.org
|
Other News
|