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A European scientist in Rome for a meeting of the Food and Agriculture
Organisation mentioned that he had just returned from Africa with a kilogram
of seed for a variety of grain. The African farmers said it was resistant
to drought. He hoped it would yield interesting results in breeding experiments
at home.

The scientist did not know that in the eyes of some his simple act made
him a villain; his guilt or innocence has been the subject of a raging political
debate in the UN for a decade. He had, in effect, stolen genetic resources
from a poor country. Plant breeders in his country might now use the seed
to create a profitable product – a profit in which the African farmers who
selected the raw material would not share.

The dilemma is this: if the scientist did not collect the seed, the
variety might never be used to create a better drought-resistant crop, one
which might benefit those same African farmers. Worse, the Africans might
decide to grow something else next year, something they need more, and the
variety might then become extinct-except for the European’s kilo of smuggled
seed.

So what was our scientist to do? The obvious solution is to let scientists
from North and South continue to collect, conserve and use Third World genetic
resources but to recompense Third World farmers for their contribution.
This is not just a question of justice; it also means giving the poor world
the means to conserve its genetic wealth.

This was the central topic under discussion at the FAO meeting in Rome,
last month, attended by the scientist.

The idea of paying the Third World for crop varieties has been adamantly
resisted by the North since the debate flared up at the FAO (This Week,
22/29 December 1983 p 870). But now the tide is changing. International
negotiations this June could produce a formula that grants just returns
to Third World farmers, while permitting all countries to conserve and use
plant varieties. The deal could mean that hundreds of millions of dollars
per year, and considerable technology, will be transfered to the Third World.

Rich minds have been changed partly by political pressure from activists
and the Third World. But even more, their thoughts have been concentrated
by the accelerating disappearance of plant varieties in the Third World,
and the increasingly evident inadequacies of systems for conserving genes.
It is touch and go whether any agreement will be in time to save the world’s
crops from genetic disaster.

Most of our crop plants evolved in the tropics. Most of their different
varieties still live there. These varieties constitute the genetic repertoire
available to the species. If you want to breed better corn, or potatoes,
or beans, you have to cross-breed varieties of that species, or its close
relatives, that already exist. They cannot be created.

The Third World has the genetic resources needed to increase food supply
and security, while the rich world has the know-how and capital to use them.
But the exchange has not been equal, because the South has had no way of
charging for its seeds.

However unjust this situation may be, there has been no real need for
rich countries to do anything about it, as long as they could still get
Southern varieties. But the situation has changed.

Some Third World countries are trying to block exports of economically
important plants. Travellers leaving Addis Ababa airport are thoroughly
searched, to ensure that no one is carrying coffee that has not been approved
for export. India does the same for pepper, Indonesia for some fruit, Turkey
for many crops.

The North has also started to fear that it may need more access to the
South for plant varieties than it thought. Many crop varieties have been
collected and stored in seed banks, basically large refrigerators, in the
North. Seed breeders once thought this gave them all the resources they
needed.

In 1983, Trevor Williams, then head of the International Board for Plant
Genetic Resources (IBPGR), the main international agency dealing with crop
conservation, could state confidently that he already had ‘all’ varieties
potatoes and ‘half’ those of rice in storage. He was sure he would have
all the other major crops safe in cold storage in five years.

Such optimism is now gone. It has become clear that not all seeds survive
in the cold, and that some varieties die faster than others, causing loss
of diversity. Jaap Hardon, head of the Dutch seed bank, says: ‘There is
more genetic erosion in the banks than outside them’.

Williams’ successor, Dick Van Sloten, said at a meeting on plant genetic
resources in Rome last month that the IBPGR will start working on ‘in situ’
collections; plots of old varieties which farmers are paid to grow. These
must be in the varieties’ native territory, in the South.

By far the biggest reason for the change of heart is the terrifying
rate at which varieties are disappearing outside the seed banks. Pat Mooney,
a Canadian agronomist who has led activist pressure on the issue, estimates
that ’75 per cent of the (varieties of the) world’s major food crops are
gone’. He says experts from the seed industry agree with the figure. This
has brought a sense of urgency to the debate on how to conserve crops; the
figure was ‘only’ 50 per cent in 1980.

Several factors are contributing to the decline. One is the success
of the seed-breeding industry. As breeders create high-yielding crop varieties,
farmers-even in the South-with mouths to feed and debts to pay, use them.
They stop growing the old, low-yielding varieties which then die out. Rich
and poor countries lamented the impending disaster at the FAO throughout
the 1980s, but argument over compensating the Third World for its genes
blocked agreement on how to put more money into conserving plants. It has
now become clear that the Third World will have to be paid, if it is to
help save the situation.

The initiative for solving the problem no longer rests with the official
agencies. Discontent with FAO bureaucracy led the US to withhold funding
in the late 1980s; the ensuing cash crisis further limited the FAO’s conservation
activities.

The experts decided to take matters into their own hands. In 1988 in
Keystone, Colorado, activists who had been criticising seed companies for
years sat down with representatives of seed companies, government scientists
and heads of seed banks, to solve the problem. The results of this continuing
‘Keystone dialogue’ will appear at a meeting next June in Oslo. The recommendations
are expected to include arrangements for paying money to the South.

The meetings have been funded by private foundations, seed companies
and the UN. Participants say they can talk more frankly, and find common
ground more easily, in these unofficial, closed meetings than in the FAO.
But since they are all delegates to the official debates as well, they are
confident the recommendations will be adopted by governments. The recommendations
will probably be part of an international treaty on genetic diversity to
be signed at next year’s UN Conference on Environment and Development in
Brazil.

Maleku Worede, the head of the Ethiopian seed bank and a leading Third
World negotiator in the Keystone dialogue, says the issue of Third World
equity-giving them a share in the profits-must be resolved if the Third
World is to participate effectively in conservation, as it must if conservation
is to succeed. ‘We cannot let the resources disappear while we argue,’ he
said in Rome.

The key to resolving the issue is called Farmers’ Rights. Many countries
recognise Plant Breeders’ Rights, a form of copyright whereby breeders are
paid royalties for the varieties they create. The FAO has adopted Farmers’
Rights as a similar compensation for the traditional varieties peasant farmers
have selected, characterised, and improved by breeding.

The FAO set up a fund to be spent in the interests of Third World farmers,
as a means of paying Farmers’ Rights. The fund is empty. No rich countries
contribute to it, said national delegates in Rome, because the FAO has acquired
a bad reputation for managing money.

Last year, at a meeting in Madras, the Keystone group also adopted the
idea of a fund. It now seems likely that it will be set up outside the FAO,
possibly with an independent management board like the fund set up last
year to transfer ozone-safe technology to the Third World. Keystone says
‘A conservative estimate indicates that $500 million per annum’, paid by
governments and not taken from existing aid budgets ‘should be available
to begin to meet the urgent need’.

This is serious money. Delegates from developed countries in Rome said
privately that they expect the fund to start out at a much lower level but
that eventually, as administration and spending priorities are established,
investment of that magnitude will be needed to save plant genetic resources.

Not all rich countries support the scheme. Andrew Cahn, of Britain’s
ministry of agriculture, said in Rome: ‘We disagree with Farmers’ Rights
insofar as it is a payment for the use of resources.’ But such detractors
are few. Henry Shands of the US Department of Agriculture says any such
fund should be ‘substantial’ and ‘sustainable’. He says funding will grow
as Third World experts apply for money for specific projects, and get results.

Jaap Hardon’s views express why many rich countries now support a large
fund for plant genetic resources in the Third World. ‘The issue is not equity,
but joint payment for conservation,’ he says. ‘The Dutch make a lot of money
on their seed potato industry, but they rely on genes from Peru. We can’t
assume that the Peruvians will do all our conservation for us.’ Money put
into conservation in Peru may be considered investment in one’s own resources,
or in someone else’s, but ‘it amounts to the same thing’, says Hardon.

The Keystone debate now centres on how to manage the fund, and what
it should pay for. It will not pay individual farmers a few dollars each
for their theoretical contribution to world agriculture. Big improvements,
like dwarf high-yielding rice, came from so many sources that no one would
know who to pay.

Instead the money should pay ‘for genetic conservation and utilisation
programmes particularly, but not exclusively, in the Third World’, says
the Keystone group. Maleku Worede says the fund could repay the South for
its genes by supporting projects the South wants. The dispute between North
and South over plant genetic resources is that ‘we have different ideas
about what germ plasm to preserve, and how to preserve it’, he says.

Northern plant breeders, says Worede, want to breed uniform varieties,
or to introduce single characteristics, such as resistance to a disease,
into crop varieties. Third World farmers need the full range of a crop’s
diversity; farmers plant different varieties in different plots to be sure
something will survive, in the face of annual weather variations that are
much greater in the tropics than in the temperate zone.

Worede says: ‘We want more in situ conservation, since it ensures continued
diversity’ better than gene banks. He pays farmers in Ethiopia the difference
between what they would earn with a high-yielding variety, and what they
earn by maintaining a plot of an old variety. ‘It is cheaper for me to do
that than to pay for electricity to run the seed bank.’

But moral, technical and material support for work with plant genetic
resources ‘is now given mainly for what interests the North,’ he says. ‘It
is hard to sell the idea of involving the community in conservation.’ The
fund could help correct this.

Pat Mooney says money is not enough to redress the equity issue. Farmers’
ownership of their own resources must be recognised, or the fund could simply
become another way to conserve Southern resources for use in the North.
‘GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, says everything in free
trade should be patentable. The only inventions in the world that are not
patentable are the innovations of Southern farmers,’ says Mooney. Keystone
has asked GATT not to rule on patents and biodiversity until this gap has
been filled.

Mooney thinks he has found the answer. UNESCO and the World Intellectual
Property Organisation approved a model law protecting communities’ rights
to folklore last year. UNESCO wants to make it a formal convention this
year. It allows societies to patent traditional knowledge, which Mooney
says includes plant varieties. ‘We cannot just trade Northern money for
Southern genes,’ he says. ‘Money, technology and information must flow’
for effective conservation and use of genetic resources. Third World farmers
will only get their fair share if they have clear titles to their genetic
property, says Mooney.

So far rich nations oppose going this far-but five years ago their acceptance
of a large fund to pay the Third World for its resources appeared equally
remote. The answer, both to equity for Third World farmers, and to the disaster
threatening crop diversity, will start to emerge in Oslo in June.