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Articles

Lessons for access and benefit sharing from community seed banks in India
April 16th, 2016

The TheruBeedi Seed Bank and Producer Group facilitate informal benefit sharing mechanisms. The approaches include offering farmers incentives to cultivate traditional or rare varieties, providing assistance in the marketing of their products, and encouraging them to use traditional techniques associated with indigenous crops. The Seed Bank and Producer Group may be considered as a viable … Read more

Giving new life to peasant seeds in Ecuador
April 16th, 2016

In the Ecuadorian provinces of Bolivar, Chimborazo, and Cotopaxi, family farmers are building new capacity to conserve and use the biodiversity on their farms. By participating in action research they gain a greater understanding and control of their plant genetic resources. This results in increased resilience to climatic and other shocks and takes them further … Read more

Looking outside the box. Access and benefit sharing for family farmers in Zimbabwe
April 16th, 2016

What is successful access and benefit sharing for smallholder family farmers? This contribution argues it is not about legal contracts or mechanisms that regulate their international transfer of plant genetic resources. It is about farmers’ access to seed diversity and their ability to share in the benefits of the continuing cycles of seed conservation and … Read more

Conclusions: Learning from farmer-led access and benefit sharing
April 16th, 2016

This special issue of Farming Matters magazine has explored the ways in which access and benefit sharing of plant genetic resources can work for family farmers. On one hand it presents cases that demonstrate the limited extent to which family farmers have been able to benefit from the ‘formal’ ABS process: the rather complex arrangements … Read more

Further Reading
April 16th, 2016

International treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture References Greiber, T., Peña Moreno, S., Åhren, M., Nieto Carrasco, J., Kamau, E.C., Cabrera Medaglia, J., Oliva, M.J., Perron-Welch, F., in cooperation with Ali, N. and Williams, C. 2012. An explanatory guide to the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing. International Union for Conservation of … Read more

Selected books
April 16th, 2016

Living on the Edge: Women, Agrobiodiversity and Livelihood Living on the Edge: Women, Agrobiodiversity and Livelihood Vanaja Ramprasad, Green Foundation & Third World Network, 2015 120 Pages ISBN: 978-967-0747-08-8 It was a fundamental question that drove this author to begin a journey across India in 1974: How could surplus food production and malnutrition co-exist? Her … Read more