“A wonderfully written and sorely needed guide to the promise of aquatic genetic resources … brimming with important pointers of ways to realize the potential of the little appreciated and frequently abused aquatic genetic resources.”

Thomas Lovejoy
President, Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment

This book looks at the issues of ownership, governance and trade in aquatic genetic resources. There is a growing demand for resources, such as fish, but also for marine bacteria that may be a useful scientific resource, for example, for the consumption of oil spills, or the discovery of new drugs.

The need for policies to manage and conserve aquatic biodiversity, to govern the access and use of aquatic genetic resources, is described, paying particular attention to the rights of indigenous and local communities and their role in its management. It also looks at existing laws, and some policy reccommendations are made, using six case studies from four continents, to illustrate key issues. There are occasional black and white photographs within the text.

Read Blue Genes Online

Blue Genes: Sharing and Conserving the World’s Aquatic Biodiversity. BY David Greer and Brian Harvey.

Full & free. Provide by Earthscan/IDRC 2004
ISBN 1-84407-106-5
e-ISBN 1-55250-157-4, 246 pp.

The advance of genetic sciences has led to a “blue revolution” in the way we use aquatic biodiversity.

By 2020, the world will be eating almost as much farmed as world fish, marine bacteria could yield the cure for cancer, and deep-sea bacteria may be exploited to consume oil spills. Science is moving ahead at a staggering speed, and the demand for genetic resources is growing rapidly – yes governance and policy lag far behind.

This groundbreaking work is the first to look at the issues of ownership, governance, and trade in aquatic resources. Blue Genes describes the growing demand for aquatic genetic resources and the desperate need to fill the policy vacuum for the management and conservation of aquatic biodiversity as a foundation for rules governing access to and use of aquatic genetic resources. Special attention is paid to the rights of indigenous and local communities providing access to those resources and their role in managing and conserving aquatic biodiversity.

The book concludes with policy recommendations specifically tailored to aquatic resources and uses six case studies from four continents to illustrate key issues.

THE AUTHORS:

David Greer is an independent legal consultant specializing in natural resources and biodiversity management policy. Brian Harvey is a fisheries biologist and President of the World Fisheries Trust.

Visit Blue Genes IDRC's Web Page

Preface:

The impact of biotechnology can be compared to that of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago. Nowhere is this more evident than in the food and drug industries. Genetic modification of crops has become so commonplace that a wide variety of products in an average supermarket now contains ingredients produced or affected by genetic engineering. The development of many pharmaceutical products results from biotechnological manipulation of the genetic codes for natural plant compounds.

The international trade in genetic resources is significant. The global market for pharmaceuticals alone is more than US$300 billion a year. Like the Industrial Revolution, the biotechnology revolution has created a demand by corporations for access to the resources of southern countries – with the difference that genetic resources (genetic material containing the fundamental units of heredity) rather than natural resources (timber, minerals, fish) are the prize today. For their part, countries providing genetic resources haven’t forgotten the price paid by many southern countries during and before the Industrial Revolution: colonization by European countries. Control over access to plant genetic resources and sharing in the benefits from their use are extraordinarily sensitive issues.

In the rush to develop global policies that deal with access to genetic resources, aquatic animals and plants have largely been overlooked. International agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) have been largely driven by agricultural and pharmaceutical agendas, and have tended to treat aquatic matters as an afterthought. The same trend appears to be occurring in the development of national strategies for biodiversity management and of laws regulating access to genetic resources.

Plant genetic resources have received far more press than aquatic ones for good reason: scientific understanding and commercial use of aquatic genetic resources lag decades behind their plant counterparts. But this situation is changing fast. Although industrial-scale aquaculture was virtually unknown 30 years ago, it’s now predicted that more than 40 per cent of global food fish production will come from farms by 2020. Similarly, bioprospecting for marine organisms with value for pharmaceutical or industrial applications lags far behind terrestrial bioprospecting – but the quest for the holy grail of a cancer cure is a powerful incentive for increased activity. Meanwhile, the natural capital of aquatic genetic diversity is rapidly being eroded by overfishing and development, with species disappearing before they are even known to humans.

While it is true that certain aspects of biodiversity and genetic resources policy can apply equally to plants or fish, significant differences need to be taken into account as well. For example, whereas seed companies can collect their genetic

resources from international gene banks, fish farmers generally rely on wild populations to replenish their broodstock. The very different nature of aquatic genetic resources (for example, hidden, migratory, publicly accessible) raises ownership issues that may be different from those known to the plant world. Communities in the areas where aquatic genetic resources are likely to be collected may have no traditional knowledge that is useful to fish farmers or pharmaceutical companies – yet some countries’ laws make the sharing of useful traditional knowledge a prerequisite for a community’s right to benefit from providing access to genetic resources.

These and many other distinctions between plant and aquatic genetic resources deserve consideration by policy makers. In addition, the vacuum in policies for the management and conservation of aquatic biodiversity needs to be addressed before countries begin to contemplate putting access regulations in place. This book offers an analysis of policy gaps and proposes approaches at the international, national and community levels to providing a foundation for the conservation and sharing of aquatic biodiversity.

Comments (2)

Name

Email

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment