Vers un partage équitable des avantages de la richesse génétique mondiale? (Towards an Equitable Sharing of the World's Genetic Wealth?)

The least developed countries (LDCs) are among the world’s richest in terms of biological diversity. Nonetheless, victims of an unequal global economic system, these countries (like the majority of countries commonly called “the Global South”) have rarely reaped the benefits of their natural wealth. In 1992, during the creation of the Convention on Biological Diversity at the Earth Summit in Rio, the “South” called for a “fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources”. It became the third objective of the Convention. At the tenth Conference of the Parties of the Convention, in October 2010 in Nagoya, Japan, the international community delineated the implementation modalities of this third goal. The need to find a balance between the requirements of developed countries (contributing to the valorization of genetic resources) and those of developing countries (contributing to their conservation) required distributed, balanced and fair participation of all countries. To asses this distribution, this article analyzes the degree of influence of the 49 LDCs in the negotiations of the Nagoya Conference. It shows that, despite significant barriers to their participation, these countries manage to impact the debate and its outcome. Through relatively efficient strategies, they use moral arguments; link their objectives with the general interest; try to build upon the knowledge of NGOs; and borrow power from stronger negotiating partners. Although the outcomes of their influence do not guarantee a fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of their resources, the study shows that LDCs nonetheless managed to include several of their claims in the final documents and influence the negotiations and the agenda-setting. These signs of participation and influence by the poorest and weakest countries of the world point to a certain amount of procedural fairness in the negotiations of the Nagoya Protocol. And this fairness is a positive step towards a fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources.