AgCan to include ENGO delegate in animal genetic resources meeting
I received the weekly e-bulletin from the Canadian Environmental Network (CEN) yesterday with the following announcement:
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) has invited the RCEN to select one (1) ENGO delegate to join the Canadian Delegation to the First International Technical Conference on Animal Genetic Resources in Interlaken, Switzerland, from September 3-7 2007.
The Conference will be the first ever inter-governmental conference dedicated entirely to concerns over current and future use of animal genetic resources for food and agriculture.
Please note there is no funding available from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to cover the selected delegate’s travel and living expenses to this Conference. Interested candidates should be prepared to secure their own funding.
The deadline to apply is Wednesday, August 15, 2007. If you are interested in participating, visit the RCEN website.
For more information, contact Leela Ramachandran, National Caucus Coordinator, telephone: (613) 728-9810 ext. 223.
As mentioned in the announcement, the meeting is the First International Technical Conference on Animal Genetic Resources and it is being convened by FAO. The meeting will consider “The State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture”, which is “the first ever global assessment of the status and trends of animal genetic resources, and the capacity of countries to manage these.” The meeting is also to negotiate and adopt a Global Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources.
Draft texts that will form the Global Plan of Action were considered at the 11th session of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. I haven’t looked at them myself but I’ve heard that they contain ‘interesting’ language on intellectual property rights.
As for AgCan’s decision to take an environmental NGO representative on the delegation, I think you can look at it two ways. The first is that this is a great initiative as it is the first time to my knowledge that AgCan has turned to the CEN to include NGO people on a delegation it is leading. It demonstrates that AgCan recognizes the environmental aspects of its work and, if all goes well this time around, hopefully they will continue to include ENGO reps on their delegations and even start to cover their costs in the future.
The other interpretation is that this is window dressing on the part of AgCan. They can say that they are trying to involve their environmental constituency while making actual participation very difficult by not covering the costs of the ENGO delegate. Few ENGOs that I know have a few thousand dollars on hand to cover airfare and accommodation to such an expensive place as Switzerland. It seems difficult to believe that Environment Canada can afford to cover the costs of ENGO representatives it includes in its delegations but AgCan can’t.
Also, the extremely short time line for submitting applications makes it likely that interested people may not see the announcement in time (particularly as we’re currently in the height of summer vacations) and difficult for ENGOs to know whether they will be able to get the funds together to go. (I should add, though, that the short deadline may not be AgCan’s fault. The CEN is in a bit of period of flux and hasn’t been issuing regular e-bulletins so it is possible that they were informed of AgCan’s intentions earlier but couldn’t get the message out.)
I hope there is an environmental NGO person who can go. Animal genetic resources are shaping up as the next area for international negotiations and it would be good to keep an eye on AgCan.
August 14th, 2007 | Category: ABS, FAO, Intellectual property | 
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