Biodiversity talks mired over protocol, conservation targets+

NAGOYA, Oct. 26 Kyodo -
A rift between developing and advanced nations continued to stall talks at an
international biodiversity conference in Nagoya on Tuesday, leaving unclear the
path for compiling rules on genetic resource use and setting safeguard targets
even as the meeting's scheduled end nears.
While the ministerial talks segment at the conference of parties to the U.N.
Convention of Biological Diversity will start Wednesday, negotiators have not
been able to draft a protocol on equitable sharing of benefits derived from use
of genetic resources or put together post-2010 targets for protecting
biodiversity.
An informal consultative group set up when the conference began Oct. 18 to
finalize the draft protocol, which already passed the initial deadline of last
Friday, again asked for an extension of its mandate at a plenary session
Tuesday.
Participants decided to extend the deadline for the group to Thursday, a day
before the planned final day of the conference.
Japanese Environment Minister Ryu Matsumoto, who chairs the conference, said
during the plenary session that the next three days ''would be absolutely
important for the history of the world and mankind'' and called upon parties to
yield results within the set time.
Among the major sticking points over drafting the access and benefit-sharing
protocol is whether to make it retroactive to cover genetic resources that were
taken in the past and still used today outside the country of origin.
Developing countries, which hold abundant natural resources, want to secure a
greater share of the benefits gained by industries that use the resources in
developing medicines and other products through the protocol, while advanced
nations, where such industries are often based, want to keep the
benefit-sharing minimal without jeopardizing access.
African nations and other developing countries, whose resources have been taken
by settlers during colonial eras, seek to gain shares of benefits gained in the
past, while developed nations reject such claims.
Debates also remain over the scope of the protocol's coverage, including
whether to include derivatives of the genetic resources, and how to secure
compliance of the rules.
Setting biodiversity conservation targets toward 2020 and 2050 is also a
critical issue that has divided the developing and developed nations, with the
latter claiming more ambitious target figures.
In a situation that is increasingly becoming a race against time, the parties
decided to hold closed negotiations of ministers in addition to the official
ministerial sessions.
==Kyodo