Miracle or menace? : biotechnology and the third world / by Robert Walgate.
- Walgate, Robert
- Date:
- [1990]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Miracle or menace? : biotechnology and the third world / by Robert Walgate. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![164 Miracle or menace? Sociology, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Madison, USA — who is a pro-Third World activist on these issues — the agreement had been really surprising. The main points accepted by developing countries and industrialised countries alike were: • The existence of plant breeders' rights — that allow property protection by Northern breeders — were not incompatible with the Undertaking. (This was a concession by the South.) • The enormous contribution of farmers to breeding useful varieties would be recognised in the concept of farmers' rights. (This was a concession by the North.) • To reflect the responsibilities of those countries which have benefited most from the use of germplasm [that is, the North], the international fund would benefit from further contributions by adhering governments. Such wording is vague, but, says Kloppenburg, it opens doors. • The benefits to be derived under the International Under¬ taking should be limited to the adherents of the undertaking. The significance of the last point is that if international gene banks were to come under the auspices of the FAO, as some delegations are recommending, then only adherents of the Undertaking, and thus contributors to the international fund, would benefit from the gene banks. This clause could therefore become the teeth of the whole Undertaking. Meanwhile, however, the US and other major plant breeding countries actually remain outsiders — observers, and not members of the Intergovermental Commission, and so non-adherents to the Undertaking. They may join, however, at some future date. According to Kloppenburg, in the US the American Seed Trade Association is calling the shots. He describes some of its principal members as out of the mid-West and knowing nowhere else... calling all talk of development 'communism'. It may take some years, therefore, before farmers' rights are implemented, Kloppenburg believes. In a related initiative, but one which to some extent competes with that of the FAO, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) together with the US-based World Resources Institute and the Swiss-based Inter¬ national Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, are drafting a Biodiversity Convention which aims to protect genetic resources world-wide; but its emphasis appears to be on the natural world itself, and the creation of parks and exclusion zones, rather than on the needs of the Third World poor.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18035644_0175.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
