tripsmay01-5f3ca590e96831bd.pdf

This joint discussion paper by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) and WWF International examines the tensions between the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). It analyzes how intellectual property rights (IPRs) can hinder the CBD's goals regarding benefit sharing, traditional knowledge, and technology transfer, and provides a set of international and national recommendations to harmonize these legal frameworks.

• The TRIPS Agreement may undermine the CBD's objective of fair and equitable benefit sharing because IPRs are often granted to individuals in one country for genetic resources obtained from another without the consent of the custodians or the sharing of benefits.
• Existing IPR systems, particularly patents, are largely unsuitable for protecting the traditional knowledge of indigenous and local communities because they are expensive, difficult to access, and cannot safeguard knowledge that is communally held across generations.
• Market-based IPR incentives may steer technology development away from the needs of poor communities—such as food security and health—and toward private industry interests in the North, including the creation of 'genetic use restriction technologies' like sterile seeds.
• High industry concentration in pharmaceutical, seed, and agrochemical markets—where the top ten corporations in 1999 held significant global market shares—creates challenges for technology diffusion and may allow owners to raise prices or restrict research.
• IPRs may indirectly harm biodiversity conservation by encouraging the expansion of monocultures of genetically uniform varieties, which displace diverse traditional agricultural systems and remove various plant varieties from circulation.
• The TRIPS Agreement provides flexibility for members to establish 'sui generis' systems for plant variety protection, but there is concern that the UPOV 91 convention may be pushed as the only 'effective' benchmark, which would limit farmers' rights to save and exchange seeds.
• The authors recommend that the WTO grant the CBD permanent observer status in the TRIPS Council to ensure biological diversity concerns are integrated into IPR discussions.
• To prevent the misappropriation of genetic resources, the authors suggest revising TRIPS Articles 27.3(b) or 29 to require patent applicants to state the country of origin and prove rightful access to the resource.
• National policy-makers are encouraged to use the flexibility of TRIPS Article 27.3(b) to exclude life patenting and to develop national registries of traditional knowledge to prevent misappropriation.

APA

Monagle, C. (2001). tripsmay01-5f3ca590e96831bd.pdf. Center for International Environmental Law. https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/tripsmay01.pdf

Chicago

Monagle, Catherine. tripsmay01-5f3ca590e96831bd.pdf. Center for International Environmental Law, 2001. https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/tripsmay01.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Monagle |first1=Catherine |title=tripsmay01-5f3ca590e96831bd.pdf |publisher=Center for International Environmental Law |date=March 2001 |url=https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/tripsmay01.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{monagle2001tripsmay015f3ca590e96831bdpdf, author = {Monagle, Catherine}, title = {{tripsmay01-5f3ca590e96831bd.pdf}}, institution = {Center for International Environmental Law}, year = {2001}, month = mar, url = {https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/tripsmay01.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }