Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 10 • Number 17 • 24th September 2010

CBD COP 10 in Jeopardy Following Montreal ABS Negotiations?

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The Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) negotiations taking place this week in Montreal, Canada were noted by observers as positive and generally constructive. However, because members were unable to effectively use the momentum gained when they met last in Montreal in July, the slow pace of progress is compromising the possibility of reaching a deal at the CBD’s Conference of the Parties this October in Nagoya, Japan.

Hopes were high for ironing out remaining disagreement on an ABS deal this week, given the considerable improvements that were made to a draft text earlier this year (see Bridges Trade BioRes, 23 July 2010). The long list of issues that needed to be addressed in this second Montreal meeting included the understandings and concepts of genetic resources, utilisation and access and benefit sharing, the protocol’s scope and relationship with other agreements, enforcement and compliance and a number of institutional issues.

While moderate improvement was made on the concept of utilisation, most other issues continued to linger in disagreement. This includes the core concepts of the protocol: What sources, actions, actors are covered? And how should benefit sharing take place?

“There is still a lot of work to be done” and the time remaining might prove too short to finalise the protocol, Timothy Hodges and Fernando Casas, Co-Chairs of the meeting, warned during the closing session.

In an infamous move in July this year Canada had objected to generalised ABS requirements, instead proposing contract terms on a case by case basis. Developing countries and indigenous groups, pointing to their considerably weaker position, strongly objected. When this week’s Montreal meeting saw little movement on this issue the group of Like-Minded Megadiverse Countries (LMMD), the Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC) and the African Group called in question their support for a new CBD strategic plan or the financial strategy if the Protocol is not adopted.

Stalling ABS negotiations could thus develop a spill-over effect, causing detrimental harm to the Convention on Biological Diversity and all its sub-agreements.

With Nagoya starting in less than a month, states will not be able to properly resume again before COP 10 while the high-level meeting itself would - if the protocol is to be adopted -, need to hammer out a COP decision on ABS, a respective work plan and important interim arrangements addressing ratification, the protocol’s place in the new CBD strategic plan and relevant financial considerations. In a final attempt to turn this into a success story, members will reconvene the weekend before COP 10 and during the conference itself.

Considering the political and technical difficulties that continue to characterise these negotiations an interim agreement leaving certain issues to new negotiations could be another alternative. However, whether this would bring about the much needed effective and reliable international ABS regime is questionable.

ABS is the CBD’s third objective and is the only one that has not been implemented through design and adoption of a legal instrument to date. The mechanism is of great importance to developing countries and negotiations are often characterised by North-South differences.

In other biodiversity news, some 140 countries represented in the UN General Assembly met to review developments and challenges regarding the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the seventh of which targets the “substantial reduction of biodiversity loss by 2010.” Experts reported that in 2010 - the Year of Biodiversity - ecosystems and species continue to disappear at an unprecedented rate. According to UN estimates, species are disappearing at one hundred times the natural rate of extinction.

“Communities everywhere will reap the negative consequences [of biodiversity loss], but the poorest people and the most vulnerable countries will suffer most,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said at the meeting. “Seventy percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas, and depend directly on biodiversity for their daily sustenance and income.”

ICTSD Reporting, “Briefing Note on the CBD ABS Negotiations,” EARTH NEGOTIATIONS BULLETIN, September 23 2010; “Biodiversity Talks Bog Down over Genetic Resources,” INTER PRESS SERVICE, 21 September 2010.