Welcome to the policy page of the Pest and Disease Project!
The project is working with small-scale farmers in four countries—China, Ecuador, Morocco and Uganda—and aims at helping them to make use of the local diversity of key staple crops to minimize the damage caused by pests and diseases. The project focuses on banana (Musa spp.), barley (Hordeum vulgare), common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), faba bean (Vicia faba), maize (Zea mays) and rice (Oryza sativa).
Legal issues arise in several aspects of the project, and all the partner countries need to understand the opportunities and constraints presented by the national and international policy and legal environment in which they operate. For example, national laws on access to genetic resources, intellectual property and bio-safety form part of the legal landscape within which project activities take place. Internationally, the national partners may be Parties to the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the World Trade Organization, and are part of international networks for genetic resources. Each legal connection provides potential opportunities and constraints for project activities.
One anticipated outcome of the project is the development of “benefit-sharing protocols for the use of local resistant materials.” At the first legal meeting of the project held at Bioversity Headquarters in August 2008 (hereinafter “the Legal Meeting”), the national partners identified the key legal issues in the project and in particular agreed upon a work plan to develop benefit-sharing options in the context of the project. This note is intended to review the steps and methodology agreed upon at the first legal meeting to assist the project countries in establishing some coherence across their diverse systems. One project output is therefore a methodology for developing benefit-sharing protocols, an output that will be useful at the national level but also to help inform international discussions on the subject. Insofar as benefit-sharing with farmers and farming communities is a measure of Farmer’s Rights, the output of the project will also be valuable to help inform discussion of these issues in intergovernmental fora, in particular in the context of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (hereinafter the IT).
