The Japanese government has announced that it will join the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in October, with the aim of facilitating information sharing and technology transfer of genetic resources necessary to develop new or improved varieties.
The treaty is intended to ensure conservation and sustainable use of the world’s major agricultural seeds, as well as fair distribution of benefits from their use among member countries including developing nations.
128 countries and the European Union have ratified the treaty, which was approved in Rome in 2001 at the conference of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.
The list of plant genetic material subject to access and benefit sharing under the treaty is comprised of 35 food crops such as rice and 81 forage crops, which are essential for food security and country interdependence. The participating nations of the treaty register information on their crops which come under the list, and the information can be shared among the members to be utilized for creating new or improved varieties.
The treaty established a benefit-sharing fund where a part of the profits arising from private companies’ development of new and improved varieties will be used to support conservation of agricultural resources in developing countries.
Japan had been cautious about approving the treaty, fearing that the treaty could threaten patents on newly developed varieties, as it was unclear to what extent the treaty allows intellectual property rights on genetic resources included in the list.
However, amid growing moves among other industrialized nations such as the United States to ratify the treaty, the Japanese government judged that the treaty would not serve to threaten intellectual property rights of member countries. The bill to join the treaty was approved in the ordinary Diet session which ended in June.
The officials of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries said that the treaty will be beneficial in that it enables a framework of more than 100 countries to share genetic resources, amid growing need to speed up development of new and improved varieties to cope with climate changes such as global warming.
An agreement on plant genetic resources first took shape as the International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which was adopted in 1983 to allow countries free access to such resources. In 1993, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) brought genetic resources under the jurisdiction and sovereignty of national governments, so the agreement was renegotiated in line with the CBD to become a treaty.
(Aug. 15, 2013)