BIODIVERSITY: National and Regional Efforts already in Progress

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 13 1996 (IPS) - While 162 governments discuss norms for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and the sharing of benefits, projects that meet the recommendations of the Convention on Biological Diversity are already in progress in several countries.

Since 1993, experts from Argentina, Chile, Mexico and the United States have been studying possible medicinal applications of vegetation from arid zones. The samples are sent to the University of Arizona, where Barbara Timmermann, of Argentine origen, is heading the project.

Timmermann has made it clear that if her team obtains a patent, 50 percent of the profits will go to a fund for conservation and for the local community where the plant species was found. The rest will be shared by the universities and other institutions that participated in gathering the plants. One percent will go to the shaman who offered knowledge on how to use the particular plant in question.

The project has already produced results. Forty of the close to 3,000 samples sent from desert areas have turned out to be interesting, and a dozen of those could actually lead to something, said the researchers, who preferred to wait until the project was finished in 1998 to provide details.

“No transfers of funds from State to State for the receiver to redistribute, because the States tend to forget to do so,” said Timmermann, whose project was designed in strict accordance with the three objectives laid out by the Convention on Biological Diversity, signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

The Convention, signed by 162 nations, commits the signatories to conserving the biodiversity concentrated in developing countries, using it in a sustainable manner and sharing the profits derived from genetic resources.

The point on profit-sharing led the U.S. government, under heavy pressure from industry, to resist signing the Convention at the Rio summit.

Genetic resources are mainly used in producing medicine and cosmetics and in agriculture and the food industry. The technology and human resources used to convert the natural resources into profits are concentrated in the industrialised North.

The more than 1,500 government delegates attending the Nov. 4- 15 Third Conference of the Parties of the Convention in Buenos Aires are negotiating norms to make the principles set out by the Convention a reality.

But while the government representatives discuss the North’s slow progress in transferring technology and financial resources to the developing South, projects on biodiversity are silently producing results in many countries.

The Natural Patagonia Foundation of Argentina has evaluated the degradation of the marine ecosystem off the country’s southeast Atlantic coast with funds provided by the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) — the Convention’s interim financing mechanism.

The Foundation is currently designing a programme for the sustainable management of the ecosystem in question, rich in natural species but damaged by pollution. The second stage of the project will also have financing from GEF. The programme is one of the few by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to receive GEF funding.

The majority of GEF resources go to governments carrying out inventories of species or in urgent need of funds for the creation of reserve areas in fragile ecosystems threatened by livestock, intensive agriculture or indiscriminate logging.

Rural communities in Zimbabwe are involved in the Campfire resource-management project, which permits the use of natural resources in tourism, mainly big-game hunting, while protecting endangered species.

Notwithstanding NGO complaints, some governments have also implemented strategies and legal frameworks towards the application of the Convention.

China, for example, recently finished a complete classification of its biodiversity. Norway organised a meeting of experts on unknown species this year. Mexico and Costa Rica promoted the creation of centres for monitoring natural resources.

The Andean nations — Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia — as well as the Philippines have made progress on legislation to regulate access to genetic resources, with sharing of profits between the host country and companies interested in exploiting the resources.

Without such national and regional efforts in designing projects and legislation that rigorously follow the guidelines set forth by the Convention, the conference that has met over the past two weeks could have been a purely rhetorical undertaking, replete with good intentions that look wonderful on paper.