The buses ferrying hundreds of delegates to and from the Convention on Biological Diversity in the Brazilian city of Curitiba last month encapsulate the challenges facing the global attempts to protect the earth's biodiversity.

The buses ran on ‘biofuels' derived from soya - the flavour of the month as a potential solution to climate change. But this seemingly harmless green technology also raises some difficult questions.

With the UN estimating more than 860 million people worldwide to be facing hunger (double the 1975 figure), the challenge before Brazil and other countries is whether valuable agricultural land should be used for meeting our energy needs instead of growing food crops.

Brazil is one of the richest countries in terms of its biodiversity, but losses from human pressures have seen the issue of conservation rise up the international agenda, as articulated by many of the politicians who attended the meetings of the CBD and the international Biosafety Protocol on March 20-31 in Curitiba.

Soya, spread widely across Latin America, symbolises a clash of world views currently sweeping the continent and beyond. Latin America is today the top world bean producer, supplying increasing global demands for meat raised on this protein.

But countries will need to assess whether the food vs. energy crop issue is an ‘either, or' question - can additional land be cultivated to meet both fuel and food needs? In Brazil, this is already happening at a breakneck speed, with possibly grave implications for biological diversity. For the pioneers of the soya boom are rapidly encroaching on one of the last strongholds of natural biodiversity - the Amazon rainforest.

The Sweep of Soya

The Amazon is widely regarded by climate change scientists as the lungs of the earth and a massive source of carbon, which, released into the atmosphere, would act as a throttle towards irreversible climate change. Campaigner say deforesting this rich resource for the sake of greener climate-friendly fuels or to fill growing consumer demand for cheap meat would fail to solve either climate change or hunger.

Soya displaces more than natural biodiversity. Modern large-scale farming with single crops is incompatible with the traditional multi-cropping of small farmers, and Latin America is witnessing an unprecedented loss of small farms to the soya sweep.

Is the cultivation of soya a food vs. energy crop issue, an ‘either, or' question - or can additional land be cultivated to meet both fuel and food needs?

The soya revolution in Latin America is also linked to the spread of herbicide resistant Genetically Modified soya. Argentina adopted GM soya early on and it is now the predominant variety in the country. Smuggling across the long border to neighbouring Brazil and Paraguay has taken place on a large scale and in part prompted the two countries to allow the commercialisation of GM soya.

Many representatives of the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon made the journey from their forest homes to voice these concerns to world leaders in Curitiba. They provided an alternative perspective to the models of ownership, technology and access being discussed at the CBD. Their central demand for recognition of their ‘customary rights' by the CBD and other intergovernmental bodies has led to some of the concerns being recognised.

However, when it comes to the Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) regime being negotiated at the CBD, progress remains painfully slow. In Curitiba the discussion was more on how to proceed, rather than making real progress towards key goals.

Whose Capacity?

It is becoming clear that developed countries themselves are a long way from actually putting in place regulatory measures that can effectively enforce such international agreements. The buzzword of ‘capacity building' - so often bandied around in the corridors of the CBD to refer to the needs of poorer countries - appears in this case to apply to developed countries too.

If rich countries are having trouble coping with workable regulations themselves, then they need to consider how much bigger the challenges are in the developing world.

Nowhere is this need for capacity more challenging than in sub-Saharan Africa and it is here that many countries are putting in place biosafety rules to regulate the movement of living GM organisms. The biggest debate in Curitiba was about the labelling of such GMOs in food aid and other imports.

Finally, the delegates struck a compromise. Where the details of the supply chain are known, labels will say ‘contains GMOs' but where it is not known, they will say ‘may contain GMOs'. This system will continue until 2012, by when there is an expectation that problems with the identification of origin would have been ironed out.

Trees and Terminator

Two GM issues dominated discussions in the CBD meeting were GM trees and Terminator (GURT) technologies.

Countries from all over the world voiced their alarm at the threat that GM trees posed to forest biodiversity. Behind the scenes, delegates expressed worries about the pace of development of GM trees, particularly the commercialisation of GM poplar trees in China.

It is becoming clear that developed countries themselves are a long way from actually putting in place regulatory measures that can effectively enforce such international agreements.

After heated discussion over several days the CBD for the first time took a position on GM trees, recognising what it called "the uncertainties related to the potential environmental and socio-economic impacts, including long-term and trans-boundary impacts"… on global forest biological diversity, as well as on the livelihoods of indigenous and local communities.

It said it would recommend CBD signatories to take "a precautionary approach when addressing the issue of genetically modified trees".

Expectedly, the controversial issue of Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURTs) - or ‘Terminator' as it has been dubbed - excited passions and delegates had to make their way past an energetic demonstration by anti-GURTS Brazilian farmers on the day of the discussion.

The strength of feeling was widely reflected among official delegations as well, and some, such as Malaysia, made stirring speeches against the introduction of this technology, which can make seeds infertile after their first use.

The meeting ended with a rebuff to an Australian bid to overturn a six-year-old global moratorium on GURTs.

In addition, representatives of two multinational biotechnology companies, Syngenta and Monsanto, told Panos that they too were distancing themselves from the type of GURTs technology that would make seeds infertile. But they both said they would maintain a ‘development interest' in other types of GURTs technology that can be used to switch on genetic traits in plants.

The Battles Ahead

The key issue of who will own, have access to and control of the planet's biological wealth remains at the forefront of political battles which look set to rage for many years. Underlying the CBD, however, there remains the expectation that a natural resource that could benefit humankind - such as a plant with medicinal qualities - should be shared universally.

If the many voices in Curitiba did not always reach consensus, their convergence around a common agenda was in itself an achievement, especially given the complex realities surrounding biodiversity.

While developed countries may be rich in dollars terms, they are poor in biodiversity. At the end of the day, the negotiation is really about how there can be, in the words of the convention, "a fair and equitable way of sharing resources and the benefits arising from them" - a vision with the potential for redressing current global inequalities.




Contributed by Rob Harbinson. Before joining Panos London as head of the Environment Programme, Rod conducted postgraduate field research with forest farmers in Zanzibar. Reprinted with permission from PANOS.

To read another Global Envision article about green fuel, see The Bumpy Road to Clean, Green Fuel.



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