I am just back from a long trip to Ecuador and Canada - hence the relative
silence (time to catch up on all those old bioplans your never read!)

This news release on the International Understanding is hot off the press.
I will post a more detailed summary of the consequences of the agreement in
a few days.

Best wishes
 

David Duthie

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Sunday July 1 9:09 AM ET

 U.N. (FAO) Reaches Key Agreement to Save Crop Diversity

 By David Brough

 ROME (Reuters) - The U.N. world food body (FAO) reached a landmark
 agreement on Sunday to try to save the world's diversity of agricultural
 crops, officials said.

 The pact followed an anguished debate pitting many poor countries and
 environmentalists against multinational corporations and wealthier
 nations.

 After a week of touch-and-go talks, delegates said the United States
 had agreed for the first time in a public forum to mandatory payments by
 plant breeders and geneticists developing new crop varieties in return for
 access to public seed banks.

 The seed banks lend out crop seeds at no charge, enabling research into
 new varieties of plants to increase resistance to disease and ameliorate
 some of the impact of global warming.

 In turn, this helps alleviate hunger in poorer nations.

 ``This international undertaking is a milestone -- it will allow the
 conservation of genetic resources for future generations,'' Jose
 Esquinas-Alcazar, secretary of the Commission on Genetic Resources
 for Food and Agriculture, part of the U.N. Food and Agriculture
 Organization (FAO), told Reuters.

 He said an international agreement to conserve plant genetic resources
 was needed because agricultural biodiversity was being lost at an
 alarming rate.

 Esquinas-Alcazar estimated that over time some 10,000 plant species
 had been used for human food and agriculture, but now no more than
 120 cultivated species provide 90 percent of human food supplied by
 plants.

 Representatives of 161 countries reached the agreement by consensus
 in the early hours of Sunday at FAO's headquarters in Rome after tough
 haggling over the details. But a separate, core issue over the patenting
of
 seeds, where rich and poor nations differ most, failed to be resolved.

 NO CONSENSUS ON PATENTS

 The biggest stumbling block was always the patents issue and after
 much agonized discussion, the meeting decided not to adopt a clause on
 intellectual property rights that limit access to seeds. The issue will be
 tackled instead by an FAO conference in November.

 Environmental groups say the patenting of food and seeds by
 multinational companies threatens food security and access by farmers
 to genetic resources.

 The life sciences industry, on the other hand, believes that seed patents
 are a vital incentive for research.

 Sunday's agreement, encompassing 34 nutritional crop groups and 39
 forage crop groups, underlined the need to protect farmers' rights,
 enabling them to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seed.

 Until now, seed exchanges have operated informally on the principle of
 ``common heritage'' -- an agreement that they are a shared international
 resource.

 Change has been forced by the U.N. Convention for Biological
 Diversity, which made nations responsible for their own genetic
 resources.

 FAO's November conference is expected to adopt Sunday's
 agreement, which will then be submitted to national governments for
 ratification, delegates said.

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