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Survey of property rights and conditions of access to genetic resources on the international level
or through umbrella agreements to be negotiated with regular recipients of center material. These
conditions would have to be agreed with countries supplying germplasm to a center. Key
conditions of the arrangements with supply countries would be that a center (i) accepts material
on standard conditions which would allow its free use for research within and outside the center;
(ii) discloses information on distribution of material to third party users; and (iii) requires a user
to acknowledge the possible rights of the supply country to compensation and deal with the
country directly, but the center will not act as collection agent for the supply country.
6.2 Material Currently Held in Genebanks
Material currently held in genebanks and thus excluded from the scope of the Biodiversity
Convention may well represent the most imposant part of the world`s surviving plant germplasm.
In the upcoming negotiations over whether and how it should be brought under international
control, the countries holding the germplasm will have awesome negotiating clout. In order to
facilitate global research, they should use it to negotiate an understanding that guarantees as free
and unencumbered an exchange of germplasm as possible.
To accomplish this, they may want to do several things: They should open these negotiations at
the technical rather than the political level. It would seem much easier to reach agreement at the
level of genebank curators than with the political representatives of some developing countries.
Such discussions would precede the political negotiations, and could take place in a preparatory
working group to be set up for this purpose in FAO. In addition, public genebanks in industrial
countries should form alliances and establish exchange networks with their own exchange and
release rules. Developing country genebanks may want to join. The prospect of their sharing
technical know-how in storage techniques and database management should make it attractive for
them to do so. These networks could eventually be integrated into FAO's network of ex situ
collections which to date solely the CGIAR centers have joined.
6.3 Farmers' Rights
The industrial world has remained consistently aloof to the farmers' rights concept although
appears so clearly grounded in equity consideration. This is regrettable because the exchange of
germplasm could well be one area in which some developing countries could trade a service for
compensation, and to that extent become less dependent on aid.
Attempts to design farmers' rights as an intellectual property right which has been the legal
construct underlying the debates in FAO have not been helpful. For one, intellectual property
rights are individual rights. Conceivably, they could be vested with a community. However,
questions of who is to defend them (more critical for the maintenance of intellectual property than
for real property) and who is to share in the spoils when compensation arises, make their
implementation difficult. Under the proposal currently debated in the Indian parliament a complex