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CIAT in Perspective 2003-2004
Cardinal Points Charting the Direction of Our Work

Sharing the Benefits of Agriculture's Green Gold     Production of pyrethrum flowers, which contain insecticidal compounds and can be sold for processing, at Muguli village in southwetern Uganda.

An initiative to help Latin America apply international biodiversity agreements

Imagine you've accumulated a small family fortune during a working career that spans several decades. You hope and expect it's enough not just to fund your retirement but eventually to provide your children with an inheritance. But unexpectedly, over a period of just 6 months, the value of your hard-earned capital collapses to just a quarter of its previous level, leaving you and your family vulnerable to an uncertain future.

The world agricultural community is currently in much the same predicament, its threatened nest egg being plant genetic diversity. The speed and scale of the decline are frightening. Over the past 150 years, the diversity of crop varieties-the biological capital amassed by farmer breeders during 10 millennia of observation and selective saving of seed and other reproductive materials-has fallen by an estimated 75 percent. The loss is closely tied to human behavior and demands: changes in land use, population growth, the uniformity required by high-input commercial agriculture, and shifting patterns of trade in food commodities due to globalization.

At the same time, the wild relatives of food crops, so vital to future plant breeding and therefore to food security, are also under threat. Habitat destruction, which includes, ironically, forest clearing for crops and livestock, is the central cause. And now climate change poses fresh dangers to certain populations of both wild and domesticated plants. For example, without direct human intervention, many of South America's wild peanut species will be extinct within 50 years.

Following up on global agreements

The Convention on Biological Diversity was adopted at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the so-called Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. Together with Agenda 21, a much broader blueprint for environmental protection, the Convention was a global call-to-arms against burgeoning threats to biodiversity-not just the diversity of agricultural plants but of all life forms.

Since then, two other international instruments, closely linked to the goals and spirit of Agenda 21 and the Convention, have been adopted. The Cartagena Biosafety Protocol, which stems from Article 19 of the Convention, was adopted in 2000 and is now in force. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, separate from the Convention but in harmony with it, was adopted in 2001 by member states of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It entered into force on 29 June 2004.

Both the Convention and the Treaty place great emphasis on equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources. The Treaty, which is specific to agricultural biodiversity, includes an article on the rights of farmers, the main custodians of edible-plant diversity. It also defines a binding multilateral mechanism for fairly distributing several kinds of benefits: information, technology, capacity building, and profits from product commercialization. The Convention is more general on this point but does mention the rights of "indigenous and local communities" and the need for equitable benefit sharing.

Over the past year, CIAT has worked with five organizations to design an ambitious collaborative project that will help Latin American countries apply the provisions of these seminal international agreements. Latin American members of the project's core planning group are Colombia's Alexander von Humboldt Institute, Costa Rica's National Biodiversity Institute (INBio), and Mexico's National Commission for Understanding and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio). USA-based members are Cornell University and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

In February 2004, after consultations at CIAT headquarters in Colombia, the group submitted a preliminary proposal to the Global Environment Facility (GEF) for a 5-year project on the conservation and use of agrobiodiversity and the sharing of its benefits. The project aims to enable Latin American countries to make wider use of their biodiversity in the context of globalization, to rationalize conservation efforts by supporting policy making with solid technical information, and to uncover "functional diversity" for enriching gene pools. Costs are expected to average about US$5 million per year.

"Biologically rich countries are eating their capital and putting their future options for sustainable development at risk," says Joe Tohme, plant geneticist and manager of the CIAT project Conserving and Using Tropical Genetic Resources. In today's highly interconnected world, he adds, the food security of most countries depends to a large extent on the plant genetic diversity concentrated in just a few countries.

Tapping expertise in tropical America

"We see this new initiative as a regional consortium, not a CIAT project," explains Tohme. "Member institutions in the core group have expertise in specific areas covered by the project, such as conservation, bioprospecting, genomics, and biosafety. They will be called on to participate in their own right but also to identify or recruit professionals in other organizations who can contribute to the consortium's work."

Tohme cites the bioprospecting work of INBio in Costa Rica as an example of the experience and knowledge that need to be tapped for regional agricultural biodiversity work. Although this small Central American country accounts for less than 0.5 percent of the world's land area, scientists estimate it is home to as many as 500,000 species, perhaps 4 or 5 percent of the earth's nonaquatic biodiversity. Cataloging, conserving, and using this "green gold" for national benefit have been INBio's primary tasks since the nonprofit public interest institute was set up in the late 1980s.

In 1991, INBio struck a deal with the US pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. Under the multimillion dollar pact, Merck was granted screening rights for a limited number of plant, insect, and microbial specimens collected in conservation areas by INBio. Merck agreed to pay a royalty, to be shared by INBio and the Costa Rican government, on profits from the commercialization of any drugs developed as a result of this work. The agreement also obliged Merck to train Costa Rican scientists in techniques to evaluate tropical plants for potential medicinal applications.

As a core member of the new Latin American agrobiodiversity consortium, INBio will extend its research and expertise to species important for agriculture. "I'm very excited about this project," says Ana Lorena Guevara, manager of INBio's Bioprospecting Strategic Action Unit. "People forget that the food we eat is based on genetic resources that are now under intense threat. They tend to focus on wild biodiversity and don't think much about agricultural biodiversity. The consortium project is a real opportunity for us to provide policy makers with the information they need to protect our food supply and security."

For Guevara, an agronomist by training, the project is, ironically, her first opportunity as an INBio scientist to consider Costa Rican biodiversity specifically in terms of its benefits for food production and rural incomes. "Rice is especially important for food security," she says. "But Costa Rica also has wild relatives of other crops with good economic potential. Wild papaya, for example, could prove valuable for the genetic improvement of cultivated papaya, allowing the development of new export markets."

Maize, beans, rice, and more

The project will focus on two major biological corridors that are centers of genetic diversity. The first extends from southern Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec through Central America to the Panama Canal area. The second lies in the Andes of Colombia and Ecuador, in northwestern South America. To keep the project manageable, it was decided that core activities should initially be restricted to just a few countries. The three national institutions in the group are located in countries well known for their wealth of plant genetic resources-Mexico, Colombia, and
Costa Rica.

The project will cover staple food crops important to Latin America and other regions, such as maize, American rice, common beans, and cassava. Also included will be a number of fruit and vegetable crops with significant commercial potential, namely cucurbits (gourd family), papaya, annona (custard apple family), cacao, and avocado, plus a few multipurpose native tree species.

Although Central America harbors a unique store of genetic diversity for maize, rice, and beans, it is no longer self-sufficient in these staples. A major benefit from enhanced conservation should therefore be greater food security in this region. Yet an even bigger payoff will probably be seen in other producing regions, especially Africa, where these crops are much more widely grown. Fortunately, the "multilateral system" envisaged by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture provides for incentives, financial and otherwise, for countries to operate their agrobiodiversity conservation programs as sources of international rather than merely national public goods.

Although a number of countries around the world have made advances in conserving plant genetic resources, Tohme says that much more needs to be done to rationalize those efforts and make them profitable. Ministries of agriculture and the environment, for example, need detailed advice on which species may have special economic importance, which are threatened, and where to designate protected areas. They also need information on how conservation efforts can, with grass roots support, be extended beyond these areas to sites such as farmers' fields and roadsides.

Biotech and GIS

The swift pace of agrobiodiversity erosion is extremely worrying to genetic resource experts. Fortunately, recent technological advances, especially in biotechnology and geographic information systems (GIS), provide a window of opportunity to reinforce plant genetic conservation and use programs-and perhaps to save some valuable species from extinction.

"A new and helpful aspect of our breeding work is that manipulation is now possible at the genetic level instead of only at the plant level," says CIAT's director of research, Douglas Pachico. Improvements in molecular marker techniques and the advent of DNA-chip technology, for example, allow rapid, accurate screening of large numbers of plant specimens, whether from gene banks or natural habitats, for traits of economic value. This information can be fed back into conservation programs to fine-tune or reorient them. Or it can be channelled into breeding programs to develop cultivars with farmer-friendly traits-such as lower water and soil-nutrient requirements, better pest and disease resistance, and higher concentrations of micronutrients lacking in the diets of poor people.

GIS tools can also make for more effective conservation of plant genetic resources. CIAT's FloraMap, for example, predicts the geographic distribution of wild plants using climate data for the locations (defined by latitude and longitude) where the species have already been collected. By overlaying other georeferenced information, such as road networks, soil patterns, administrative boundaries and population centers, FloraMap can also help identify suitable areas for in situ conservation.

Pachico also notes that the intellectual property rights (IPR) scene has changed dramatically in recent years. On the one hand, international agreements explicitly recognize the sovereignty of national governments over the genetic resources within their borders. On the other hand, private firms are increasingly taking advantage of legal means to protect innovations, whether these be patent applications or enforcement of royalty agreements through court action. If international agreements are to foster truly equitable benefit sharing, says Pachico, then CIAT and other centers of the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) must be ready to assist their national partners with capacity building related to plant genetic resources.

"Ian Johnson, our CGIAR Chair, has stressed the need to link the work of the international research centers to the whole set of international conventions and agreements. The bottom line is that the CGIAR has got to make its research more relevant to the major issues being discussed in these global fora. A just distribution of the benefits of biodiversity is one of those issues."

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