By Cary Fowler, Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, Chair of the International Council, Svalbard Global Seed Vault
Imagine a world in which the biological foundation of agriculture becomes politicized. Where countries abrogate their responsibility to conserve and refuse to share resources. Where the fate of a country’s major food crops lies in the genetic traits for disease resistance held by another country unwilling to share.
Food security and national security go hand in hand, and both depend on healthy and diverse agricultural systems created in large part through access to and use of crop genetic resources. The recently ratified International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources prevents this drastic scenario from occurring.
First proposed at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in 1979, the Treaty was completed and adopted in 2001. Last week, the Senate gave its overwhelmingly bi-partisan consent, paving the way for the United States to become the 141st Party to the Treaty.
At first glance, the Treaty might sound esoteric, technical, and irrelevant. It is anything but. The Treaty establishes norms and procedures for the conservation and exchange of “genetic resources”—most often, seeds—between countries. This natural resource is the foundation of agriculture and global food security. In addition to its common use and utility in basic biological research, it is employed in plant breeding to fashion improved and more productive crop varieties.
In a rapidly changing world with climate in flux, with pests and diseases constantly evolving new and more potent attacks against food crops, and with the need to produce more food with less land, water, and chemical inputs, the ability to access plant genetic resources for research and breeding provides the options and the traits necessary for creating sustainable farming systems, ensuring food security, and maintaining diversity.
Virtually all countries maintain national genebanks to conserve their crop diversity and supply seeds to their plant breeders. No country is independent, however. No country comes close to having the full array of traits found in the genepools of any major crop. The United States, for example, has one of the best collections of wheat diversity worldwide, but this amounts to only 5 percent of the samples stored in facilities around the globe. For the United States, 95 percent of the samples stored, and thus a significant amount of the diversity of wheat and other crops, lies outside our borders, potentially under restricted access. For all other countries, especially developing countries, the situation is more risky and dire, and their dependency on genebanks is even greater.
The Treaty mandates that Parties cooperate to promote the development of an “efficient and sustainable” system of conservation and that they take steps to minimize threats to crop diversity. Parties are required to “facilitate access” for research and plant breeding to materials such as seed samples that are under their management and control and in the public domain. Agreed “benefit sharing” mechanisms are in place to generate at least modest funds for supporting the aims of the Treaty.
Like any international law, not to mention the stop sign at the end of the street, “implementation” can be uneven. Some Parties could cooperate better, and more than a few could provide better access to their samples, as they expect others to do.
Long before becoming a Party to the Treaty, the United States had an exemplary record of conserving and providing samples from its national genebank in Ft. Collins, Colorado. As a Party, the United States will still face the challenge of ensuring that all countries faithfully implement the Treaty. The difference is now we have a seat at the table, giving us greater leadership and a more credible voice. It will take diplomacy and resolve to convince others that national self-interest involves cooperation in conserving and using our common heritage of crop diversity. The world can little afford anything less. Good faith implementation of the Treaty is a prerequisite for building food security for all countries. U.S. membership takes us one huge step forward towards this critical and achievable goal.