CBCN Newsletter
Volume 2, Number 2, November, 1997
Botanical Gardens' Collections and the Biodiversity Convention: Questions
of Access and Benefits
David Galbraith
Co-ordinator, CBCN
Botanical gardens are finding themselves in the middle of a complex
international process to interpret and put into effect several sections of the
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Gardens find themselves in this
position because of their important roles as collectors, interpreters and
disseminators of plants from around the world that may be useful or enjoyable.
While it would be an exaggeration to claim that the Convention is putting those
roles in jeopardy there are some real issues that botanical gardens must face in
the coming years if they are to continue their mission as they now understand
it. In this article I will outline why there are concerns over how botanical
gardens acquire and disseminate plants in their collections arising from the
CBD, and what steps we are taking as a community to address those concerns.
The Convention on Biological Diversity was formulated with three specific
objectives: the conservation of the earth's biological diversity, the
sustainable use of that diversity, and ensuring that benefits that come from the
use of biodiversity resources are shared with the people to whom the resources
are a natural patrimony. These objectives are laudable, but putting them into
effect is becoming a long and very complex set of negotiations.
First of all, the CBD is an agreement among signatory nations (168
governments plus the European Commission). As such, it has its effects primarily
at the level of international exchanges of biological materials and knowledge.
The Convention also calls on signatories to have national policies on the
conservation and cataloguing of biological diversity. Secondly, each of the
signatories has different laws and traditions regarding how the resources within
its boarders are owned and how they may or may not be used. Thirdly, there are
many different types of biological resources and many different uses for them,
some of which have yet to be invented.
In most cases, the convention is considered to apply to genetic resources,
but defining genetic resources isn't necessarily easy. In the language of
Article 2 of the CBD, genetic resources means "any material of plant,
animal, microbial or other origin containing functional units of heredity",
" of actual or potential value." "Biological resources", on
the other hand, "includes genetic resources, organisms or parts thereof,
populations, or any other biotic component of ecosystems with actual or
potential use or value for humanity."
Genetic engineering, the purposeful rearrangement of specific genes for a
desired outcome using recombinant DNA techniques, clearly makes use of genetic
resources. A geneticist adding a foreign gene to a plant to make it resistant to
a disease is clearly using genetic resources, because she is using material
containing "functional units of heredity."
Many other uses of biological materials are also dependent on genetic
resources but may not require the laboratory manipulation of DNA. A plant
breeder who rearranges hundreds of thousands of genes when making a hybrid cross
is making use of a biological resource - but is she also using a genetic
resource? It is arguable that each time we purposefully breed a plant or an
animal we are making use of genetic resources, even if we do not directly
manipulate genes but instead rely on natural processes of genetic segregation
and recombination to do the rearrangement for us. The activity of breeding a new
plant would be impossible without the genetic resources underlying the process
of creating biological variation.
It is also possible that future developments in the process of genetic
engineering will further blur any functional distinctions between genetic and
biological resources. Each time we bite an apple, crack a nut or peel a banana
we are consuming biological material, and within that material are the units of
inheritance. It's possible to extract DNA from many day to day products , the
first step in studying and using that genetic material. DNA extraction is now
taught in high-school biology and chemistry classes. Our ability to study and
change genetic material is accelerating and becoming more commonplace, and is
itself changing.
Try, then, to imagine how hard it is to develop national frameworks for how
genetic resources are to be accessed. Such a process must accommodate
applications that haven't been invented for plant species that might not yet
have been discovered. This challenge is daunting, especially to developing
countries which are struggling to meet existing international agreements or to
developed countries which may have financial resources in abundance but lack the
will to see their commitments fulfilled. The CBD also makes distinctions between
genetic resources that are domesticated and those that are in a wild state. The
Convention does not seek to interfere with agricultural development of
domesticated species, but what of species which are commonly taken from nature
to domestic settings, such as orchids? Finally, there appears to be little or no
information on how much economic support the use of genetic resources can really
bring to a developing country and little or no information on how much it will
cost to regulate that use.
There are good reasons to be both hopeful and concerned about the use of
biodiversity resources. It is hoped that the desire to make use of genetic
resources by industry in the developed nations will itself generate economic
support for the conservation of biodiversity-rich natural areas. Such support
could be captured through license fees for biological prospecting. Unfortunately
there are few examples of this support materializing to protect natural
habitats.
Botanical Gardens Collections
One gap in the Convention on Biological Diversity that creates some of the
present situation for botanical gardens is that the language of the convention
does not cover collections of plants or other organisms made prior to the
convention itself. As many as half of the higher plant species on earth are
already growing somewhere in botanical gardens. As higher plants are a major
source of potential genetic material for economic development, companies and
researchers may well wish to obtain access to such plants to develop future
products. Rather than going to the country from which a plant was originally
obtained, industrial users may be able to obtain specimens from botanical
gardens. If the organism was obtained by the botanical garden before the CBD
there is no obligation to then share benefits with the country from which the
plant was originally collected.
In response to all of this, individual countries are now drafting legislation
or policy that will express their own reaction to the objectives of the
Biodiversity Convention. The individual responses to the convention are as
varied as the countries that draft them, and reflect the underlying philosophy
of the nation and its approach to natural resources and the economy.
In Canada there are several differing approaches to the issue of how access
should be granted to our own genetic resources. Agriculture and Agrifood
Canada's Dr Brad Fraleigh is in charge of our biodiversity convention
responsibilities for agriculture, and is an expert on our plant genetic clonal
resource system. At a recent workshop on how different countries are deciding
how to regulate access to genetic resources, Dr Fraleigh explained that Canada
views access to genetic resources for crop plants to be a food security issue
world wide, and that Canada therefore advocates an open system. There are many
other types of uses for genetic resources, though, from forestry to ornamental
plants. For these other sectors in Canada the situation is not as clear.
Even if Canada is able to develop a mechanism by which genetic resources can
be used sustainably within its own boarders, institutions like botanical gardens
look beyond their national shores for plants of beauty and utility for their
collections and their constituents. An example of how the situation may develop
in some countries can be seen in the recent Decision 391 of the Andean Pact
nations. The Andean Pack is an economic union not unlike our own North American
free-trade agreement, consisting of Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and
Peru. Decision 391 seeks to put regulations in place to control the access that
the outside world has on the genetic resources of these countries.
If a recent report by Manuel Ruiz Muller of the Peruvian Environmental Law
Institute is any indication, the Andean Pack countries may find it difficult to
make Decision 391 work to their own advantage. The costs of administering the
complex regulatory process of 391 may well exceed any economic return that could
come from license fees for exploration or other sources of payment for the use
of resources. If this seems like, well, small potatoes to Canadians, just
remember that our most popular food, potatoes, are native to the Andean pact
countries, and that thousands of wild varieties that form the genetic basis for
future improvement of potato varieties are found no where else.
Decision 391 affects more than industrial uses of genetic resources; it
includes in its regulations that all collections of organisms for scientific
purposes or for conservation purposes must go through the same bureaucracy as
would a drug company seeking a cure for cancer in the Amazon rainforest. In
other words, new collections of plants for botanical gardens, and even new
herbarium specimens for pure research, are covered under Decision 391. As
individual nations and groups of nations like the Andean Pack countries draft
their respective legislation on access to genetic resources, botanical gardens
are going to be increasingly faced with restrictions on whether they can collect
new plant specimens in other countries without complex licensing and
bureaucracy.
Few Canadian Gardens in Federal Domain
Our Canadian response to the Convention on Biological Diversity has included
the express hope that organizations in sectors other than government will take
up the spirit of the convention rather than wait for leadership by the
government. The federal government of Canada does not operate a national
botanical garden. Canadian botanical gardens and arboreta are a diverse group of
institutions, only a few of which are operated by departments of the federal
government (e.g. Morden Arboretum of Agriculture and Agrifood Canada). For the
most part, Canada's botanical gardens are either provincial institutions (e.g.
Royal Botanical Gardens), municipal institutions (e.g. Montreal Botanical
Gardens,), or are departments within provincial institutions (e.g. University of
British Columbia Botanical Garden, Devonian Botanical Garden, Memorial
University of Newfoundland Botanical Garden, The Arboretum of University of
Guelph), or within municipal institutions (e.g. Botany Department of Metro
Toronto Zoo, Calgary Zoo and Botanical Garden).
An appreciation of the diversity of institutions maintaining
scientifically-based collections of living plants in Canada is heightened by
considering the varying scales of the collections. The largest botanical
collection in Canada is maintained by Montreal Botanical Gardens (25,000 species
accessions), with significant collections in several others (e.g. 14,000 at
University of British Columbia; 6,500 at Royal Botanical Gardens). Many other
institutions such as arboreta maintain collections of between 200 and 2,000
species.
These institutions also cross sectoral boundaries individually. For example,
in 1996 Royal Botanical Gardens received about 30% of its operational budget as
grants from the Province of Ontario, 24% as grants from the Regional
Municipalities of Hamilton-Wentworth and Halton, and self-generated the
remaining 46% through admissions, donations, membership fees and other sources.
As is the case for many botanical institutions in Canada, Royal Botanical
Gardens is correctly described as both a government institution (at two levels
of government) and as a member of the charitable sector. This remarkable
institutional diversity makes a single response to the challenges of the
biodiversity convention unlikely for Canadian botanical gardens.
Botanical gardens are becoming increasingly active in their consideration of
all of these issues. Over the next two years, I will be participating in a
program to develop new approaches to the access of genetic resources by
botanical gardens on behalf of Royal Botanical Gardens and The Canadian
Botanical Conservation Network. The program, being run by Royal Botanic Gardens
at Kew in London, England, will bring together representatives of 15 botanical
gardens from around the world to share their experiences and concerns and to
work together toward a common response. The objective of this process is to
create new ways of looking at what are being called "access issues":
how botanical gardens will obtain new specimens in the future, and how others
will gain access to botanical gardens' collections as well. The program begins
with a workshop in December, 1997 at Kew Gardens, and continues through at least
two more meetings over the coming two years. At the end of the two years it is
planned that the participants will be able to put measures into place in their
home institutions that will answer the access issues to the satisfaction of the
spirit and letter of the biodiversity convention and to the advantage of the
gardens. Following this pilot program, the experiences of the participants will
be shared with other botanical gardens around the world.
The second important issue that will be discussed at the Kew workshop is the
idea of sharing the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources. Although
the Convention on Biological Diversity calls for such benefits to be shared, it
doesn't specify how the sharing will take place, or even what benefits really
are. If there are to be benefits from the use of intact genetic and biological
resources then our present economic system requires that there is also economic
use of the resources to generate the benefits. It's still not clear just what
those benefits will be. Economic returns generated by pharmaceutical companies
are perhaps the easiest kind of benefits to identify, but one can imagine other
kinds of benefits, too.
One example of sharing non-monetary benefits arising from the use of genetic
resources was provided by Dr Mike Balick of the Economic Botany section of the
New York Botanical Gardens at the May, 1997 meeting of the American Association
of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta in New York City. Dr Balick has been exploring
for new cancer-fighting compounds in plants in South America, with the
cooperation of local healers who use many different plants for their own
practices. Even before any commercial product is developed, Dr Balick shares the
results of his research and any laboratory trials in the USA with the indigenous
healers he works with in the field. Thus the knowledge comes full circle and
aids the local people by increasing the efficacy of their traditional healers.
Botanical gardens are now struggling with these biodiversity issues. Access
and benefits-sharing questions affect the core of gardens' reason for existing:
their collection of plants, how they are maintained and enhanced, and how they
will be used in the future. For gardens that are institutions of their national
governments, taking part in the biodiversity convention process is part of their
formal mandates. For others, participation is part of the recognition that the
collections we hold in trust for the public are not separate from the larger
world of plants or from our basic concern over human well-being, but exist as
readily-accessible resources that should benefit humanity and conservation.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Kerry ten Kate, Conventions and Policy Section, Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this article.
Directory of Plant Conservation In Canada Available
A first draft Directory of Plant Conservation in Canada 1997 is available for
review from the CBCN Office. The directory will provide users with contacts in
government, non-governmental organizations and the private sector that are
involved in various ways in plant conservation in Canada. Additions and
corrections are eagerly sought. Please contact David Galbraith for a copy.
CBCN Members
The Canadian Botanical Conservation Network is well on its way to becoming a
recognized not-for-profit organization. During the summer of 1997 we opened
three membership categories through which organizations and individuals can
participate. In September we filed our application for charitable status with
Revenue Canada.
As of November 8, 1997, our member list includes:
Institution Members
Calgary Zoo and Botanical Garden, Calgary, Alberta
The Arboretum, The University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario
René Pronovost, Service de l'environnement, Ville de Québec,
Québec
and membership...
We welcome new members in the network and look forward to more institutions
and individuals joining the network.
We have established three categories for membership. Institutional Members
are botanical gardens, arboreta and related institutions maintaining collections
of living plants. Organizational Associate Membership is open to other groups
and organizations who share the objectives of the network and are interested in
participating. Individual Associate Membership is available for individuals who
wish to get involved.
Anyone interested in membership in CBCN should contact the Coordinator, David
Galbraith, for more information.
CBCN Newsletter is produced by the Botanical Conservation Office of Royal
Botanical Gardens, Hamilton, on behalf of the Canadian Botanical Conservation
Network. For more information on CBCN please contact:
Dr. David A. Galbraith, Coordinator, Canadian Botanical Conservation Network,
Royal Botanical Gardens, P.O. Box 399, Hamilton, Ontario Canada L8N 3H8
tel: (905) 527-1158, ext. 309
FAX: (905) 577-0375
Email:
Produced with financial support from Environment Canada and its Environmental
Conservation Branch, Ontario Region.
