Unsung guardians of food security

M.S. Swaminathan
The Hindu, 17 February

The loss of every gene and species limits our options for the future. This is why genome and gene saviours are invaluable; their efforts provide the tools to meet food security challenges.

ON FEBRUARY 20, 2007, Union Minister for Agriculture and Food Sharad Pawar will present the first Plant Genome Saviour Awards to tribal and rural women and men, for their invaluable contributions to genetic resources conservation and enhancement. This is a historic occasion for global biodiversity conservation and it would be appropriate to review briefly the genesis of the movement for recognising and rewarding the primary conservers of genetic diversity, who have so far remained unsung.

Historians have long recognised the critical role of tribal and rural families, particularly women, in the selection of plants and animals for domestication. More than 10,000 years ago, when men were hunting and gathering food, women started selecting plants from the wild for cultivation.

For example, at the Donyi-Polo Temple at Along in Arunachal Pradesh, there is a portrait of a woman credited with the introduction of rice into cultivation. This marked the transition from food gathering to growing. It is a mark of the acuteness of the early selectors that not a single plant has been added to the list of major domesticated crops over the past many centuries. This is why even the World Intellectual Property Rights Organisation (WIPO) has agreed to recognise the IPR rights of communities that have not only conserved biodiversity but also added value through selection and identification of the properties of economic value.

From the beginning of the 20th century, industrialised countries have enacted legislation to safeguard and reward the IPR contributions of commercial plant breeders. Since 1961 such legislation has been coordinated by the Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), which has its headquarters in Geneva along with the WIPO. The Director General of the WIPO is the Secretary General of the UPOV, which is an inter-governmental organisation currently with 63 countries as members. The International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (the UPOV Convention) came into force in 1968 and has since been revised in 1972, 1978, and 1991. The 1991 Act, which entered into force on April 24, 1998, has further strengthened the IPR rights of plant breeders.

Chairing Commission II of the general conference of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 1979, I urged that the irony of the poverty of primary conservers co-existing with the prosperity of commercial breeders should be ended by developing procedures for recognising and rewarding the contributions of the former. This was followed by a resolution moved by India, Mexico, and several other countries at the FAO General Conference in 1981 emphasising the need for equity in sharing benefits from a nation's agro-biodiversity heritage. In 1983, a Commission on Plant Genetic Resources was set up by a resolution of the FAO Council, of which I was then the Independent Chairman. Deliberations in this Commission led to the birth of the concept of farmers' rights. There was a general consensus that farmers' rights should be defined as collective rights of communities involved in the conservation of agricultural plant diversity. This concept got enshrined in Article 9 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture of the FAO (FAO Treaty), which came into force on July 29, 2004.

Much of the crop genetic diversity occurs mainly in developing countries, where farm families have been identifying and conserving economically valuable plants. Centres of civilisation have also been major centres of domestication of crop plants and conservation of agro-biodiversity, thereby indicating the intimate relationships between cultural and biological diversity. The concept of farmers' rights, however, did not find ready acceptance among most developed countries and multinational seed companies. To resolve this conflict, the Keystone Centre in Colorado, U.S., convened a series of multi-stakeholder dialogues under my Chairmanship during 1989-91. The second dialogue in this series was hosted by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) at Chennai in January 1990. Major multinational seed companies participated in this dialogue and issued the following consensus statement on farmers' rights:

"Farmers' rights, a concept which has been developed and adopted in FAO recognises the fact that farmers and rural communities have greatly contributed to the creation, conservation, exchange and knowledge of genetic and species utilization of genetic diversity; that this contribution is on-going and not simply something of the past; and that this diversity is extremely valuable. Local communities bear much of the burden of protecting germplasm and the rest of the world has an obligation to help them carry out this task and help them in utilizing the material. Yet neither the marketplace nor current intellectual property systems have any way of assigning a value to this valuable material. No compensation or reward mechanisms exist."

The Chennai consensus paved the way for the benefit sharing provisions of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted at the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which gives explicit recognition to the rights of the primary conservers and incorporates the principles of prior informed consent and equity in benefit sharing. The MSSRF convened in January 1994 a multi-stakeholder consultation to prepare a draft Act for conferring concurrent recognition to breeders' and farmers' rights. At a follow-up consultation convened by the MSSRF in 1996, a revised draft legislation was prepared, titled "Plant Variety Protection and Farmers' Rights Act," to emphasise that the rights of breeders and farmers, who are allies in the struggle for sustainable food security, should be mutually reinforcing.

The 1996 Chennai draft provided the basic text for the final Act adopted by Parliament in 2001, under the title, "Plant Varieties Protection and Farmers' Rights Act" (PPVFR Act). This is the first legislation of its kind in the world that simultaneously recognises and rewards the contributions of breeders and farmers to the development of new crop varieties.This concept is in conformity with the provisions of both the CBD and the FAO Treaty. It satisfies the need for enacting a sui generis legislation for protecting the IPR of plant breeders stipulated under the WTO Agreement in Agriculture.

The Indian Act recognises the multiple roles of farmers — as conservers, cultivators, and breeders. As cultivators, farmers are entitled to keep and plant their own seeds (plant back rights). As breeders, they are entitled to the same rights as commercial breeders. As conservers, they are entitled to recognition and reward from a National Gene Fund. To implement these provisions, the Government of India set up a Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Authority in 2005 in New Delhi under the leadership of the distinguished agricultural scientist, S. Nagarajan. The Authority and the MSSRF organised in 2006 a consultation at Koraput, an important centre of genetic diversity in rice, to develop a methodology for according recognition to tribal and rural communities for their selfless contributions to sustainable food security. The Koraput Declaration urged:

The preamble to the PPVFR Act calls for recognition to the contributions of farm families to crop improvement made at any time. Agro-biodiversity centres like the Koraput region in Orissa, where tribal families have preserved and improved rice genetic material over many centuries, need to be protected from genetic erosion. Tribal families who have conserved important genetic material for public good at personal cost deserve recognition and reward.

The National Gene Fund should be activated since severe genetic erosion is occurring in major agro-biodiversity rich areas. There is need to create an economic stake in conservation. This can come only by according economic benefits and social prestige to the primary conservers, who are often women.

The MSSRF proposed that tribal and rural communities living in penury but conserving valuable genetic diversity should be recognised as "Genome Saviours." This is what will become a reality when the first Genome Saviour Awards are presented. This step would lead not only to financial support for the revitalisation of the on farm conservation traditions of local communities, but also help to spread genetic literacy. The loss of every gene and species limits our options for the future, particularly in the context of potential adverse changes in climate. This is why genome and gene saviours are invaluable; their past and current efforts provide the tools to meet the food security challenges of today and tomorrow.

National policy for farmers soon

Press Trust of India

COIMBATORE, Feb. 25: A national policy for farmers is likely to be in place on 15 August, the 60th Independence day of India, eminent agriculture scientist, Prof MS Swaminathan said today. Since there was no exclusive policy for farmers, the new national policy would find ways and means to raise their income, Mr Swaminathan told reporters here. Saying that the union agriculture minister, Mr Sharad Pawar had already discussed the issue with the officials, based on his draft policy, which envisaged to look after the income of farmers, he said this would be placed before the National Development Council for discussion among by chief ministers, as agriculture is a state subject. The chief ministers, after discussion would put it before the cabinet and the new policy was expected to be in place on 15 August, he said. “When there is a pay commission and other mechanism to decide the income of employees, why should not there be a policy for farmers, 70 per cent of the total population of India,” he asked. A process is on to set up a National Biotechnology Regulatory Authority, to analyse the risk and assess the benefits, which would be transparent, he said. Similarly, a National Association of Genome Entrepreneurs would be formed on 14 April here.

Swaminathan is, therefore, in the way of becoming another Mashelkar in Agronomy, another patent filer, super agent of transnational agro-companies!! - IP