| Summary: | The ongoing debates about access to and commercial use of biodiversity and genetic resources, and the application of intellectual property over gene-based products and technologies, have attracted a huge body of academic commentary and critique. While these debates have continued with some progress at international and national levels, there remains a number of issues that are yet to be addressed. The new dimension to the ongoing debates about biodiversity, genetic resources and intellectual property is the growing use of new biological technologies and knowledge systems such as genetics, genomics, synthetic biology and bioinformatics. These technologies and knowledge systems have made genetic resources more valuable because of their potential to address the pressing global challenges of agricultural growth, food security, public health, climate change and environmental sustainability, including meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations. To deliver on potential solutions to these global challenges the demand for the use of the materials of biodiversity and genetic resources is rising, but the perennial questions of who can provide or obtain access to these resources, who gains the benefits from such access, and how to ensure that genetic resources are accessed and used in a fair and equitable way still remain. Perhaps the turning point for the current debates about access to and use of biodiversity and genetic resources can be traced to the adoption of the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 19921 that formally recognised the sovereignty of Nation States to control their biodiversity and genetic resources. While there had been important developments preceding this international agreement2 - for example under the Antarctic Treaty in 1950s, 3 the Outer Space Treaty in the 1960s, the Convention on the Law of the Sea in the 1970s/19804 and the International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in the 1980s5 - it was the CBD that delivered 1 (1992) 1760 UNTS 79 (CBD). 2 See Charles Lawson, Regulating Genetic Resources: Access and Benefit-sharing in International Law (Edward Elgar, 2012). 3 (1959) 19 ILM 860. 4 (1982) 1833 UNTS 3.
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