Side Event

Common pools of genetic resources: A solution for effective and fair ABS?

Organizer
FEU, University of Bremen

Date and Time
21 October 2010 18:15 - 19:45

Meeting
Tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 10)

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has widely been understood as arranging access to genetic resources and benefit sharing in the form of bilateral exchanges between providers and users. This arrangement has often proved to lack efficiency and distributional justice. Based on a reading of the CBD as enabling voluntary multilateral solutions we have studied common pools of genetic material and of genetic information. Common pools have the potential of facilitating access, monitoring uses, collecting benefit shares and forwarding them to all source countries. They have emerged as management networks on in situ genetic material, collections and collection networks of ex situ resources, data banks and meta-databanks of genetic and biochemical information, and networks and collections of traditional knowledge. Based on preliminary empirical and legal analysis we will present a typology of common pools, explain why or why not pools emerge, and submit a legal model for common pools, including genetic information bases and pools of in situ and ex situ genetic resources, which may be linked with the multilateral system of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources.