Most of the vanilla flavoring our ice cream today is artificial, derived from the genetic signature of a plant that was known only to one indigenous Mexican tribe hundreds of years ago. The sequenced genomic information of the plant available on public databases was used as the basis for a synthetic flavor that today competes with vanilla grown primarily by small-scale farmers in many countries.
Very little, if any, benefit of exciting scientific advances has reached the communities that gave us vanilla in the first place.
“Wild genetic resources and pharmaceuticals… are billion-dollar businesses. They are clearly profitable… that is not in dispute,” Charles Barber of the World Resources Institute think tank told AFP.
He said, “There is a huge amount of really valuable information put into the system from research and use of wild genetic resources. And there is currently no mechanism to compensate those people in the form of digitally sequenced data from where This information is coming”.
Most of the information comes from poor countries.
Fair sharing of benefits derived from digitally stored genetic sequencing data has been a headache for negotiators at the COP16 biodiversity summit in its second week in Cali, Colombia.
At the last conference, in Montreal in 2022, 196 countries of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) agreed to create a benefit-sharing mechanism for the use of digital sequence information (DSI).
Two years later, they still need to resolve such fundamental questions as who pays, how much, into which fund and to whom does the money go?
‘Cheap and very fast’
The issue is complex.
There is little debate that genetic data-sharing on mostly free-access platforms is important for human advancement through, for example, drug and vaccine development.
But how to determine the value of indexed information? And should the first people to discover a plant’s special utility be compensated?
“Sequencing technology has advanced so much that you can use a handheld device a little larger than a cell phone and you can literally sequence a genome in an hour or two and upload it as soon as you sequence it. Are,” Pierre du Plessis, a DSI expert and former negotiator for African countries in the CBD, told AFP.
These gene sequences are then uploaded to a database, which artificial intelligence can search for potential clues for product development.
The value of DSI is estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars per year. And there is abundance of it.
“Once the sequence is put into a public database, generally no benefit-sharing obligations apply,” Nithin Ramakrishnan, a researcher at the Third World Network, an NGO that advocates for developing countries, told AFP in Cali. It happens.”
“As when sandalwood sequence information is available in the database, it does not matter whether India wants to share its sandalwood with a cosmetic company or not.
Mandatory
One point of contention in Cali is the demand by developing countries that payment for DSI use should be mandatory, perhaps through a percentage levy on profits from drugs, cosmetics or other products.
They also want guarantees of non-monetary benefits such as access to vaccines produced from sequenced genetic information from viruses and other pathogens.
Ramakrishnan said, “We want a real understanding, sector-specific understanding of what non-monetary benefits will be shared and we want the system to be mandatory – users should have some kind of obligation to share the benefits.”
Another important point is access to DSI funds for indigenous people and local communities.
Developing countries want information on genetic databases to be traceable and to be “accountable to the governments” of the countries where it comes from, Ramakrishnan said.
But rich countries and many researchers oppose such a model which they fear would be too onerous, potentially putting the brakes on scientific activity that could benefit all of humanity.
With such differing viewpoints, observers doubt that the Cali COP will come up with any concrete decisions on outstanding questions by closing time on Friday.
The World Wildlife Fund has said that “many more rounds of negotiations appear to be necessary” on the DSI.
Barber added: “I think this is not going to be resolved here.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
