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Symposium on food security and biodiversity: Benefit sharing
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Reflections: Saving Genes through
Improved Access and Benefit Sharing
Opening remarks on world food 2003 by Andrew Bennett
Former Executive Director of the Syngenta Foundation
for Sustainable Agriculture
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The international response to the need to conserve
and use plant genetic resources to meet
the challenges of hunger, poverty and environmental
protection has been to weave a complex
and frequently ambiguous web of agreements
to govern the actions of those engaged
in the conservation and management of plant
genetic resources for food and agriculture.
Such ambiguity has become the breeding ground
for suspicion and mistrust. The polarities are
fuelled by tensions in world trade, the use of
new technologies and debates over the roles
of the public and private sectors. Misconceptions
seem to fly further and faster, finding
easy access to media headlines. The rather less
dramatic, but in the end more important,
successes and lessons learnt are not so newsworthy.
Controversy and global events draw attention
and resources away from the important task of
saving and securing plant genetic resources.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust, which aims to
raise an endowment fund of $260 million to
assure funding for the world’s ex situ collections,
is struggling to raise $100 million from public
and private sources.
The need is to build partnerships and trust
aimed at improving access to genetic resources
and creating systems of benefit sharing that
work and that are fair, particularly to resource
poor people. These systems must provide
incentives for good behaviour.
Benefit sharing
can take many forms: - Cash from royalties
and agreements;
- New varieties and better yields;
- New crops with different market opportunities;
- Crop varieties with improved resistance to
pests and diseases;
- The cleaning up of traditional
varieties that have been contaminated with
viruses;
- Restoration of traditional
varieties that have been lost or destroyed by
natural disasters or war.
We must also be able to assess progress towards
the better conservation of plant genetic
resources, improved access to the collections,
and fair sharing of benefits for those involved.
The most obvious of these is the safekeeping
of and improved access to the genebanks.
However, another way to measure success
is through the impact on the income or food
security of resource-poor farmers. Whichever
measures are chosen, they must be published
and progress must be assessed by the partners.
These are real challenges, but there are a growing
number of examples of people and institutions
that are trying to find ways forward.
They are learning valuable lessons and
building trust. It takes time to build these partnerships.
The gap between accessing genetic
resources and traditional knowledge and the release
of a product is long. The investment
needed to develop them into suitable and safe
products for markets is high, and not all
projects will result in a ‘commercial success.’
This means that access may not result in a
flow of benefits.
There are risks that should be
identified and understood by all parties –
there will be an art in spotting winners. Those
who have charted new territory have always
found critics, both constructive and negative,
along the way. This is not an agenda for the
faint hearted.We need to identify the constraints and successes
and to share experience. It is only
through an open process that we can build accountability
and trust. In the spirit of sharing,
this booklet contains the learnings and lessons
presented at this symposium.
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