Agrobiodiversity and Farmers' Rights: Dynamics and Bangladesh's Policy Responses

Abstract

Agricultural biodiversity is absolutely fundamental to human survival and well-being. It is crucial for breeding crops and providing genetic traits required to deal with pests and diseases, as well as changing climate conditions. Farmers not only use biodiversity to meet daily needs but also hold a special role as custodians of biodiversity information and practices. This specialized knowledge is very important propagating genetic material for crop development and achieving food security. For reasons obvious, global policy discourse affirms immense importance on agrobiodiversity. Some landmark international instruments like Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resource for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), Union for the protection of New variety (UPOY), Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), Sanitary 8: Phyto-sanitary (SPS) Agreement, Cartegena Biosafety Protocol etc. have already been adopted and Some of the cross cutting issues like access and benefit sharing mechanism are still in international negotiation table. The global regime is visibly divided into North and South block. North backed by Multi-National Companies (MNCs} wants to guarantee breeders' rights with minimum farmers' privilege but south wants legally protected absolutely farmers' rights. Food-population imbalance in newly independent countries in 1950s led to the new era of agricultural production modalities popularly known as 'Green Revolution'. High Yielding Variety (HYV}, irrigation, pesticides ft chemical emerged as new savor. Initially this new technology increased yield but its monoculture method alarmingly dwindled down the biodiversity, soil fertility and environmental resilience. More importantly the new regime made agriculture dependent to MNCs and vulnerable to pest and diseases. To overcome the downbeats of green revolution the MNCs came up with new approach built on biotechnology which is more commonly known as 'Genetically Modified (GM} crops regime. In new regime, MNCs alters farmers' variety genetically to a new featured variety like salt/drought/flood tolerant variety or vitamin enriched variety (golden rice) or pest & diseases tolerant (Bt cotton, Bt eggplant etc.} ………………………………