CBD Working Group on Access and Benefit-Sharing

WG ABS 8 / Montréal, Canada / November 9 - 15, 2009

Convention on Biological Diversity

Governments to negotiate an International Regime on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit-Sharing
It's crunch time for Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. At the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, they were mandated to adopt an instrument to effectively implement the convention’s provisions on access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing, and traditional knowledge. Now they have just two negotiating sessions left to finalise this international regime before their deadline of October 2010. Will industrialised countries agree to a legally binding instrument to share the benefits from genetic resource use with biodiversity-rich developing countries? And will the role of indigenous and local communities in conserving and developing bio-genetic resources and traditional knowledge be recognised? 
 

Protect and survive: customary safeguards, traditional knowledge

In thousands of rural communities from Bolivia to Bangladesh, traditional knowledge makes up the living core of culture. Bound up with local livelihoods and biodiversity, it forms a holistic system precisely tailored to local needs and environmental capacity. Its evolution over time and through shifting conditions ensures traditional practices are robust and adaptable to climate change.

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Protecting Community Rights over Traditional Knowledge

Since January 2005, this project focuses on developing alternative tools to protect traditional knowledge relating to biodiversity, which are rooted in local customary laws rather than based on existing Intellectual Property standards . It aims to strengthen the inter-linked 'biocultural systems' which underpin traditional knowledge- biodiversity, landscapes, cultural and spiritual values and customary laws.

The current system of intellectual property grants exclusive commercial rights and risks undermining collectively held traditional knowledge which is sustained and renewed through sharing, customary resource use and distinct cultural values. Policy on traditional knowledge tends to focus narrowly on protecting rights over Traditional Knowledge, and not over the related bio-genetic resources with which it is used.

Working with indigenous and local communities in China, India, Kenya, Panama and Peru , this project has developed local tools to protect and strengthen traditional knowledge systems (eg. community biocultural registers and protocols, mechanisms for equitable benefit-sharing and value addition), and informed policy and law on traditional knowledge and genetic resources at local, national and international levels. 

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Seed industry and UN agency ignore traditional ways to protect biodiversity and knowledge

Communities worldwide risk losing control over their traditional knowledge and biological resources because a UN agency (the World Intellectual Property Organisation -WIPO) and the global seed industry insist on using Western intellectual property standards for managing access to them.

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