Source: Agricultural Biotechnology Network in Africa (ABNETA)

Delegates at the second meeting of the Contact Group established by the Interim Committee of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), held in Alnarp, Sweden on 24-28 April, agreed on a draft standard contract to facilitate access and benefit-sharing of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.

Although a number of unresolved issues remain in the text, known as the Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA), it was forwarded along with an accompanying resolution for revision and eventual adoption at the first meeting of the Governing Body of the ITPGRFA, which is scheduled to be held 12-16 June 2006 in Madrid, Spain (see Bridges Trade BioRes, 2 September 2005, http://www.ictsd.org/biores/05-09-02/inbrief.htm).

Once adopted, the SMTA will act as an agreement between farmers, plant breeders, research centres and others to enable them to gain access to the crops covered by the multilateral system established by the ITPGRFA. It aims to standardise the way in which these recipients return a portion of the benefits from the products to the provider of the resource, significantly reducing the transaction costs of fairly and equitably accessing and sharing the benefits from plant genetic resources.

Delegates agreed, in what was described as a "breakthrough", to establish a dispute settlement process whereby international arbitration over disputes on particular SMTAs will take place, likely under the auspices of the ITPGRFA secretariat at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. However, there is still disagreement on the definition of the "product" and "sales" that would trigger the benefit-sharing provisions of the SMTA, including whether all income or income minus 30 percent generated by products based on genetic resources must be used to calculate the amount of financial benefits to be shared with the providers of genetic resources. The extent to which recipients of genetic resources will be required to share this income with the providers of the resources remains to be determined, although delegates suggested this might be resolved at the Madrid meeting. The draft notes that although recipients of genetic resources from the multilateral system would not be able to claim intellectual property rights over the resources "in the form received" from the system, they could claim rights over subsequent products that use these resources.

The report and draft SMTA are available at ftp://ext-ftp.fao.org/ag/cgrfa/cgmta2/smta2repe.pdf