News and Analysis • Volume 1 • Number 1 • October 2007
How best to conserve farm animal diversity?
With global human populations, as well as their appetites for meat, egg and dairy products, growing at rapid rates, a narrow range of farm animal species are becoming more popular — at the expense of traditional breeds. However, the hardy traditional farm animals are often well-adapted to harsh conditions in developing countries. Also, in a world increasingly seeing the effects of climate change, having access to a wide range of animal genetic material would serve as an insurance regime. The world is, however, currently losing one traditional livestock breed per month.
In order to halt this trend, and safeguard farm animal genetic resources, governments adopted a global Plan of Action as the culmination of the first International Technical Conference on Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in Interlaken, Switzerland, in early September. The Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources represents the first internationally agreed framework to halt the erosion of livestock diversity and to support the sustainable use, development and conservation of animal genetic resources. The negotiating process has taken place under the auspices of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, which also prepared a comprehensive background report on the current state of the world’s animal genetic resources.
The global Plan of Action focuses on four strategic priority areas: characterisation, inventory and monitoring of trends and risks; sustainable use and development; conservation; and policies, institutions and capacity building. It calls for the provision of technical and financial assistance, especially to developing countries and countries with economies in transition, to help them implement its provisions.
Private or collective rights?
Meeting in parallel in Wilderswil, a number of organisations of pastoralists, indigenous peoples, smallholder farmers and NGOs discussed problems related to industrial livestock production, which they identified as the fundamental cause of the current crises leading to the erosion of farm animal genetic diversity. With a few breeding companies from the North dominating the markets, the life-styles and livelihoods of vulnerable small farmers have been put at risk. In a declaration of their own, the civil society organisations said they “want livestock keeping that is on a human scale. We defend a way of life that is linked deeply with our cultures and spirituality and not just aimed at production.”
The civil society groups supported the concept of collective rights as a solution. In the Wilderswil Declaration, they stressed that “Ownership, knowledge and innovation at the community level are often of a collective nature. Therefore local knowledge and biodiversity can only be protected and promoted through collective rights. Collective knowledge is intimately linked to cultural diversity, particular ecosystems, and biodiversity and cannot be dissociated from any of these three aspects. Any definition and implementation of the rights of livestock keepers should take this fully into account.”
Regarding modern intellectual property rights systems, the Declaration stressed that “[I]t is clear that the rights of livestock keepers are not compatible with intellectual property rights systems because these systems enable exclusive and private monopoly control. There must be no patents or other forms of intellectual property rights on biodiversity and the knowledge related to it”.