Good news from Madrid, proclaims Emile Frison

The first meeting of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture does not sound like a source of cliff-hanger thrills – but it was.

Not until five in the morning on the last day, after an all-night negotiating session, did delegates in Madrid finally agree the text of a contract that will govern the movement of samples of plant genetic resources. With that in place, the way is clear for farmers and plant breeders to get access to biodiversity they need to adapt agriculture to meet unforeseen future challenges.

The Treaty is the first international instrument that deals with the needs of agriculture. It covers the incredibly rich diversity hidden within the plants we depend on for food. These are the genetic resources that, for example, enable one variety of rice to grow in five metres of water while another thrives in relative drought. Farmers and breeders use genetic resources to create new varieties that meet current challenges.

Swollen shoot disease of cacao, palm leafhopper, banana bacterial wilt, Asian soybean rust, clover-root weevil, UG99 strain of wheat rust; newly virulent pests and diseases are battering at humanity’s food supply. Developed nations can choose to afford plant protection chemicals, if they are available and effective. For poor farmers in developing countries, genetic resources are one of the few assets they can use to secure their food supply.

Accessing resources

Historically, the world has depended, and continues to depend, on genetic resources from elsewhere. In the 1920s a Russian relative of wheat donated resistance to a fungal disease that threatened the entire US harvest. A new virulent strain of that disease recently emerged and the solution will also almost certainly be found in varieties from somewhere else.

In recent years the flow of material among breeders and farmers has dwindled considerably. The Treaty loosens the regulatory log-jam by establishing a multi-lateral system for access and benefit-sharing. A single variety may have hundreds of ancestors from scores of countries in its pedigree. Rather than having to sign scores of bilateral agreements, contracting parties sign up to the Treaty. That gives them facilitated access to the plant genetic resources held by all the other contracting parties.

Possibly the most important of these plant genetic resources are held in the genebanks of the Centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. There are more than 650,000 samples with a preponderance of the farmers' varieties and wild relatives that are such a rich source of sought-after traits. The Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA), agreed early that Friday morning, sets the terms and conditions for the use of these and other materials under the Treaty.

Most notably, the SMTA establishes that any variety that uses any material derived from the multilateral system is, by definition, a ‘product’. If that product is commercialized, a payment of 1.1 per cent of net sales goes into the Treaty's fund, to support conservation and research in developing countries. The payment is compulsory if the new variety is not available for further use in research and breeding and voluntary if it is available.

Enforcement

An important and innovative aspect of the Treaty is the recognition of a third-party beneficiary with an interest in the enforcement of the SMTA. The SMTA is an agreement between provider and recipient of the material, not among the contracting parties of the Treaty, but the monetary benefits flow to an international fund. FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), acting as the third-party beneficiary, has the right to bring legal action on behalf of the Treaty parties in cases of suspected infringement.

Infringement will itself be easier to police, thanks to the simple definition of a product and to the plans for an integrated information system that will not only accumulate and share information about the resources – one of the non-monetary benefits envisaged by the Treaty – but will also make it easier to track which samples were distributed to whom.

Cause for hope

The meeting was a huge success. Negotiators were willing to compromise on the level of payments, for example, and each side moved to meet the other. The seed industry, which some sceptics were saying before the meeting would scupper any chance of agreement, proved very constructive. So there is cause to be hopeful, and we need it.

With the International Treaty now in place, plant genetic resources will once again be able to play a central role in improving agriculture and securing our food supply for the future.

Dr Emile Frison is Director General of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, Rome