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Major Elements and Recommendations of the Global Plan of Action
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The Fourth International Technical Conference on Plant Genetic Resources met in Leipzig, Germany, from 17 to 23 June 1993, and was attended by 150 countries and 54 inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations. The Conference was convened at the request of the FAO Commission on Plant Genetic Resources and was endorsed in Agenda 21 of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, and at the Nairobi Conference for the Adoption of the Agreed Text of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Conference adopted The Global Plan of Action for The Conservation and Sustainable Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources and the Leipzig Declaration. It also considered the first Report on the State of the World's Plant Genetic Resources.
The Global Plan of Action was prepared through a participatory, country-driven process, involving a wide variety of stake-holders: governments, non-governmental and industry organizations, and individual scientists. A total of 158 governments prepared Country Reports, assessing the status of their plant genetic resources, as well as their capacity to care for and utilize these resources. Twelve regional and sub-regional meetings were held, where governments considered regional problems and opportunities, and made recommendations for the Plan.
The Report on the State of the World's Plant Genetic Resources, was welcomed as "the first comprehensive world-wide assessment of the state of plant genetic resources conservation and use". The Report identified the urgent priorities which are addressed in the Plan. The Report and the Plan are two major elements of the FAO Global System for the Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources.
The Leipzig Declaration, which commits the governments present to taking the necessary steps to implement the Global Plan of Action. Through the Declaration, the Conference stressed the need to enlist the widest possible participation in its implementation, and reaffirmed that "funds should be made available to finance the implementation, by developing countries and countries with economies in transition, of the Global Plan of Action". Accordingly, the Conference requested that the major multilateral and bilateral funding and development institutions be invited to examine ways and means of supporting the implementation of the Plan.
FAO is reporting the outcome of the Conference to major international, regional and national bodies dealing with food and agriculture, and inviting their member constituencies to promote and take part, as appropriate, in the implementation of the Plan. FAO is also examining ways in which its technical programmes can support implementation of the Plan.
The Global Plan of Action will promote the conservation and sustainable utilization of plant genetic resources, and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits. It contains twenty priority activities dealing with in situ conservation and development, ex situ conservation, the utilization of plant genetic resources, and institutions and capacity-building. Each activity is introduced by a brief assessment of the current situation in that field, spells out intermediate and long-term objectives, and includes specific agreed recommendations for actions in sections on policy and strategy, capacity-building, research and technology, and administration and coordination.
In Situ Conservation and Development
The most useful genes for food and agriculture come from traditional farming systems, often in marginal areas. To date, most work has focused on the ex situ conservation of such resources for food and agriculture. The agricultural systems that generated and maintained this diversity were rarely thought very important in themselves. In situ conservation of this diversity within domesticated crops must take place in the cultural and environmental context of the farm: the Global Plan of Action recommends systematic surveying and inventorying. In situ conservation through on-farm management of plant genetic resources, as well as the in situ conservation of wild plants of importance to food, is a valuable complement to ex situ conservation.
Over 1000 million of the world's poorest rural people continue to conserve, manage and improve their own plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. The rich crop diversity that exists today offers ample testimony of what such farmers have achieved. The Global Plan of Action builds on this legacy, and recommends new on-farm conservation and participatory breeding initiatives, including training and access to a wider range of appropriate genetic resources. A new partnership is needed between genebanks and plant scientists on the one hand, and farmers and farmers' organizations on the other. The first signs of such a partnership can already be seen in some recent genebank and non-governmental organization initiatives. By supporting the on-farm development of plant genetic sources, the Global Plan of Action seeks to share some of the benefits of these resources directly with farming communities in the farming systems that have developed them.
The Plan also calls for a new initiative by the international community - including FAO and the CGIAR system (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) - to address disaster situations in which farmers often lose their indigenous and locally adapted planting materials. The international community has a responsibility in such situations to help countries that have in the past shared their resources. By establishing a capacity to identify, multiply and return these materials from genebanks around the world to farmers who have lost their crops, the international community can help countries revive their agricultural systems after natural disasters, wars and civil strife. This can save both human lives and aid funds.
Ex situ collections of plant genetic resources are an essential foundation for long-term food security and the sustainability of agriculture. Reports by countries in preparation for the Fourth International Technical Conference showed that many ex situ collections are now in danger. There must be immediate action, if the valuable materials already collected are not to be lost forever. The Global Plan of Action recommends a major programme to transform the current diverse, poorly coordinated, often inefficient and frequently redundant efforts into a rational, effective and sustainable system. The Global Plan promotes ex situ collections not as mere repositories for genetic material, but as dynamic centres for coordinated conservation and utilization at national, regional and international level.
The Global Plan of Action proposes that countries be given the opportunity to conserve their diversity under sustainable ex situ conditions. Ex situ collections are an important part of many national systems to conserve plant genetic resources for food and agriculture and, provided they are fully integrated into national programmes, are fully complementary with in situ and on-farm conservation. Many of the countries that most urgently need to undertake large-scale collecting do not have suitable ex situ conditions for the storage of the materials collected. The Plan therefore calls upon existing ex situ facilities, including those of the CGIAR, to provide space to store the collections of countries which currently lack their own long-term storage facilities. FAO has prepared a model legal agreement to protect the rights of providing countries and institutions.
Poor storage conditions and the lack of capacity to regenerate deteriorating accessions has put much of the valuable material in many ex situ collections at great risk of loss. Agenda 21 of the 1992 Earth Summit called for urgent action to regenerate such materials and countries continued to stress this urgent need in preparation for the International Technical Conference. The Global Plan also provides not only for securing existing collections, but for targeted collecting, which is necessary to fill gaps and to rescue uncollected materials in danger of extinction. Although costly, such one-off activities are imperative to prevent the loss of past investments and the genetic resources themselves.
The Plan puts ex situ conservation on a more cost-effectiveness and rational footing, within a framework of national, regional, and international cooperation. Countries will now be able to devote more systematic effort to developing and using their plant genetic resources for agricultural improvement.
Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources
The utilization of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture is the ultimate justification for their conservation: utilization and conservation are inextricably linked. When plant genetic resources are not optimally utilized, they are not fully valued and unlikely to be optimally conserved. Poor utilization therefore limits the long-term economic and social realization of society's investment in the conservation of plant genetic resources. Strengthening the links between conservation and utilization and promoting better utilization of plant genetic resources are important ways of giving concrete recognition to Farmers' Rights.
Much of the world's rural population is wholly dependent on its own farm-saved seed and planting materials for its food security. The Global Plan of Action therefore also aims to strengthen local capacity to produce, distribute and market farm-saved seed of crop varieties essential for local food security. The Plan also aims to help diversify agricultural production systems, through promoting the increased use and commercialization of local and under-utilized crops and varieties and to make production systems more sustainable through the more rational deployment of increased levels of crop genetic diversity.
Many priority activities in the Global Plan of Action aim to make plant genetic resources more easily available and of more immediate use to plant breeders and farmers. Plant genetic resources must be well described and documented for the useful characteristics they contain, if they are to be used efficiently. For many crops, breeders are at present deterred from using a wide range of plant genetic resources of potentially great value to agriculture because of a lack of documented characterization and evaluation information. More value could be added to plant genetic resources by fully characterizing, evaluating and documenting them than in almost any other way. The Global Plan recommends a major, international initiative to characterize and evaluate accessions in existing collections for useful genetic characteristics.
A further related strategy to make it easier for farmers and breeders to have effective access to genetic resources and to locate useful cultivars and genes, through evaluation, lies in the development of properly identified and documented core subsets of larger collections. At present, they are usually faced with the daunting prospect of searching through huge numbers of samples, at large expense, and with low chances of success of identifying desirable cultivars or genes.
Programmes to develop improved cultivars can take decades. The Global Plan of Action therefore recommends making the genetic material itself more immediately and easily usable through genetic enhancement and pre-breeding. This is necessary if diversity is to be more easily incorporated into crop varieties. The Global Plan recommends an initial focus on the most pressing problems identified in fifteen priority crops of regional and international significance. The tangible added benefit would be the broadening of the genetic base of our food crops, which would increase world food security.
Institutions and Capacity-Building
The Global Plan of Action focuses squarely on developing and strengthening national programmes. National programmes are the link between a country's constituency of rural people, farmers and plant breeders and the international plant genetic resources community. If national programmes are to meet the food security challenges of the future, their capacity will need to be strengthened. National programmes need to integrate more closely in situ and ex situ conservation with breeding, seed production and distribution.
Countries need to establish appropriate policy and institutional frameworks, including mechanisms for coordinated planning and action and programme strategies for the conservation and utilization of plant genetic resources. Many priority activities in the Plan therefore support the improvement of national planning and coordination capabilities. Priority-setting and effective management, as well as improved infrastructure, are essential if national programmes are to take full advantage of technical assistance, training, access to information and genetic materials. The overall effect of the coordinated priority activities in the Plan is intended to be synergistic. This will create strong national programmes with sufficient capacity to meet anticipated international needs into the next century.
Without regional and international cooperation, single countries cannot hope to benefit fully from plant genetic resources and appropriate technologies for their improvement. Regional and crop networks have a key role to play in such cooperation, particularly for countries that today have limited capacity. The Global Plan of Action calls for existing regional and crop networks to be strengthened and for new networks to be created, where necessary. Governments will need to commit themselves to active support for the networks that serve them and the Plan provides for assistance in organizing and servicing them.
The Global Plan provides for strengthened training and educational activities, particularly at national level. This includes advanced interdisciplinary study, courses in technical and managerial subjects and special on-site training for rural women, who play an often unrecognized role in developing and maintaining plant genetic resources. Agricultural and research training institutions are encouraged to include plant genetic resources topics in their curricula. The Plan also promotes the transfer between countries of appropriate technologies for the improved conservation and utilization of plant genetic resources.
High priority is given to constructing broad, user-friendly information systems at both national and international levels. The Plan specifically provides for assistance in the planning and development of documentation and information systems in developing countries which are compatible between countries.
Public information activities are also given high priority, to generate support for genetic resources work at national and international levels. National programmes need appropriate information materials in local languages. Schools, of all types, including specialized agricultural institutions, should be a vehicle to spread a better understanding of the value of plant genetic resources to long term food security.
Finally, the Global Plan of Action stresses the need for international cooperation, through strengthened planning and coordination activities at all levels, in support of the goals of conservation, sustainable utilization and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits. There is a need to establish internationally agreed principals, criteria and obligations and policy and legal frameworks. National support and international cooperation and good will, are needed to conserve and develop plant genetic resources for the needs of today and of future generations.
The FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture guided the preparation of the Fourth International Technical Conference on Plant Genetic Resources, and will provide the forum for countries to periodically evaluate and coordinate the Work Programme. The Global Plan of Action will be implemented as an integral part of the FAO Global System for the Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources.
The International Technical Conference reaffirmed that "funds should be made available to finance the implementation, by developing countries and countries with economies in transition, of the Global Plan of Action", and stressed the need to enlist the widest possible participation in the implementation of the Plan. FAO is inviting major multilateral and bilateral funding and development institutions dealing with food and agriculture to identify ways in which their member constituencies can promote and take part, as appropriate, in the implementation of the Plan.