Treaties for food security, benefit sharing

 By TOSHIRO SHIGAKI

NO country is self-sufficient in plant genetic resources. In Papua New Guinea, for example, sweet potato is a major staple crop, but its centre of origin is Latin America.  

With climate change, it is ex­pected that the world will become even more dependent on introduced crops and varieties.  

In order to discuss the ways to facilitate and streamline the process of germplasm exchange, a regional meeting was held at Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) in Suva, Fiji, last December.

Historically, seeds and planting materials for agriculture have been exchanged freely with no strings attached.  

That is why PNG farmers can grow sweet potato without any payment to Latin America.  

This practice has seen some modifications recently, when seed companies started to protect their new crop varieties and countries recognised their sovereign rights over plant genetic resources. The change is very well deserved considering that the development of new varieties requires a large initial investment and seed companies must recover the cost.  

As for the sovereign rights over genetic resources, their protection is often challenging because of the pressure from increasing population and expanding human habitat, and the efforts by the communities to preserve the genetic resources must be recognised.  

In spite of these facts, it is for the best benefit of all countries to share the genetic resources without unnecessary hindrance.

In many countries, including PNG, when foreign researchers or commercial companies plan to take out biological specimens for research and development purposes, they are required to obtain permission from an appropriate authority.  

However, it is not always straightforward to identify which authority to seek permission from.  

Besides, the specimens may be taken out without a prior informed consent or discussion with the community or government on benefit sharing when new products are commercialised. To address such issues, an international treaty called Nagoya Protocol was adopted by the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity at its tenth meeting on October 29, 2010, in Nagoya, Japan.  

The Nagoya Protocol provides guidelines for access and benefit sharing for the donor and recipient countries of the biological materials.  

It provides streamlined and predictable procedures for the access to genetic resources by establishing national focal points and competent national authorities to serve as contact points for information, grant access, or cooperate on issues of compliance.  

The Nagoya Protocol covers all biological materials without regard to the use of the materials, and the agreement on the material transfer must be discussed between the donor and recipient countries (bilateral).

The bilateral system used in the Nagoya Protocol may not be convenient enough when genetic resources from multiple origins are required for research or food production.  

For this reason, many countries have ratified a treaty called International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA). The treaty came into force on June 29, 2004.  As of this writing, 131 countries are the parties of the treaty.  

This treaty covers most of the world’s important crops, as listed in its Annex I, and the transfer of the materials is intended for either food or agricultural use.  Unlike the Nagoya Protocol, it is a multilateral system, meaning that genetic materials from donors are pooled and preserved at gene banks, and access can be granted by the gene banks through standard material transfer agreement (SMTA), without negotiating with all the countries where the genetic resources were originated.

In the Pacific region, a number of countries, including Fiji, Samoa, Cook Islands, Kiribati, Samoa, and Palau, have ratified ITPGRFA and some countries have become a member of Nagoya Protocol, recognising their benefits and flexibility they allow.  Unfortunately, PNG is not yet a member of these treaties.

Besides ITPGRFA and the Nagoya Protocol, three Melanesian countries, PNG, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, have agreed to develop a trilateral system for exchanging germplasm.  Although it is limited to the three countries geographically, its scope is broad to cover essentially all genetic resources.  

Such a regional treaty is expected to further facilitate the efficient flow of genetic materials and benefits. The modern varieties of crops cannot grow in the wild without human intervention because they lost the traits necessary for their survival.  For example, undesirable traits such as shattering of seed heads before maturity that allows plants to survive in the wild have been bred out in cultivated crops.  

Therefore, the preservation of these genetic resources is in human hands, and the cost of preservation can be met by the benefits arising from their use.  

The two-day meeting concluded that the ratification of the treaties is the first step to that end.