Abstract
Recently enacted two international laws – Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing (ABS) and International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) – deal with the access/utilization of and benefit sharing arising out from genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge (TK). Both the instruments lack relevant appropriate provisions guiding the countries to take administrative or legislative measures for covering and addressing the benefit sharing from the ex situ collections of genetic resources that were accessed well before the Nagoya Protocol came into existence. Developed nations show no willingness to share the benefits arising from the biological resources which they accessed from developing countries and retain ex situ. As a result, most affected entity would be the indigenous people and local communities (ILCs) – the custodians of most of the local biological resources – who would receive no benefits. The implications on this crucial issue will be critically reviewed in this article to identify appropriate solutions to this bottleneck using a few case studies.
Highlights
The international organizations and United Nations have conserved the genetic resources of huge array of wild and domesticated plants and animals
According to the Second Report on the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (FAO, 2010), there were more than 1750 reported individual gene banks or germplasm collections worldwide in 2015, conserving an estimated number of about 7.4 million accessions (FAO, 2010)
New interpretation would lead to the current application of the Protocol, regardless of when physical access took place (Lassen, 2016)
Summary
The international organizations and United Nations have conserved the genetic resources of huge array of wild and domesticated plants and animals. The International Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR; since 2006 Biodiversity International) sponsored more than 500 collecting expeditions from national and international institutions to most countries of the world, during which over 225,000 plant samples were gathered (Thormann et al, 2012). This wealth of landraces and wild relatives was distributed to 49 selected gene banks to conserve the germplasm for the long-term and to over 500 gene banks for conservation and use (Maggioni et al, 2015).
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