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How will plant breeding survive the regulation implementing the Nagoya Protocol in the EU?


Brussels, Belgium
January 22, 2014

Today the European Parliament’s ENVI Committee voted on a compromise text of a future EU regulation on ‘access to genetic resources and fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from their utilization in the Union’ which will implement the Nagoya Protocol into EU law. The compromise was reached by negotiators from the EP and the Council in early December 2013 with the aim to allow the EU and its Member States to ratify the Protocol by mid-2014.

The main element of the EU regulation will be a so-called “due diligence” obligation according to which all users of genetic resources will have to assure and seek information to prove that the genetic resources they utilize have been accessed in accordance with applicable Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) rules. They will also have to keep and transfer such information to all subsequent users. Users then will have to declare at the point of “final stage of development” that they have exercised their due diligence. The regulation allocates the unclear task of defining the meaning of “final stage of development” for the different sectors concerned to the Commission. Regular checks by national authorities on users’ compliance will then be carried out.

To facilitate compliance of SMEs in particular with these new and burdensome obligations, the Commission shall create a register of those collections of genetic resources where users will be deemed to be compliant. There is also a possibility foreseen for users to elaborate sectoral best practices and get those recognized by the Commission. Again, the Commission shall further define the details of how such best practices could be elaborated and recognized.

While the general objective of ABS rules is to strike a fair balance between suppliers and users of genetic resources, from the point of view of plant breeding the future EU regulation does not achieve this. It does not pay sufficient attention to the specificities of agriculture in general, and more specifically fails to recognize the way how plant breeding works in practice. “In plant breeding, every newly developed plant variety is the result of a combination of thousands of different genetic resources deriving from all over the world. Due to this high interdependence of breeding, it always functioned as an open source system, based on the free access by anybody to all plant genetic resources for further breeding. This is also enshrined in the breeding exemption in the UPOV Convention which provides a specific IP protection system for the sector.” Garlich v. Essen, Secretary General of ESA explains.

Breeders feel that under the due diligence obligation access to plant genetic resources will no longer be free. This would specifically impact small and medium-sized breeding companies – which are still numerously present in the EU – and slow down the overall innovation rate of the sector. “The European plant breeders have always shown a commitment to ABS obligations both in the context of the CBD and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (IT PGRFA); but such obligations must not put unreasonable burden on the sector and require it to change the way it has successfully worked since centuries.” von Essen summarizes the view of the industry. The IT PGRFA provides for a multilateral benefit-sharing mechanism which is specifically adapted to the way plant breeding works and with that ensures that the free flow of plant genetic resources can continue.

ESA will continue to ask European Parliament and Member States to take the specificities of plant breeding better into account prior to the adoption of the new regulation by the EP plenary, currently foreseen for February. “We still hope that the respective ideas developed by the EP’s Agriculture Committee may be taken up again.” von Essen expresses the hope of the seed sector. “These ideas would help to strike the desired balance of interest while preserving the functioning open source model that has been the base for the high level of innovation in EU plant breeding.”
 



More news from: Euroseed


Website: http://www.euroseeds.org

Published: January 22, 2014

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