Parties are negotiating in Nairobi on Target 17, while Gene Drives undermine the Biosafety Protocol and FPIC

By Adam Breasley, Save our Seeds

Gene drives threaten to undermine the integrity of the UN Cartagena Protocol and international and national biosafety systems, including the procedures for Advanced Informed Agreement of countries/governments and Free, Prior and Informed Consent of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, as well as the right to health and to a safe environment.

The Cartagena Protocol is founded on national sovereignty. It was largely the work of African negotiators like Dr Tewolde Egziabher of Ethiopia who fought for African and other countries to retain the sovereign right to be fully informed so that they could make decisions in the interests of their nations on what living modified organisms to import into their territories, and to protect their biodiversity, agriculture and the health of their populations from unwanted GMOs. 

It is strange therefore to see delegates of many of these same countries today working with the Gates-funded Target Malaria and other gene drive promoters undermining their national sovereignty by allowing gene drive technology designed to aggressively spread GMOs throughout species and to move freely across their borders. More so because many of these countries fought long struggles in the past to gain their political independence from former colonial powers. 

Similarly strange, IPLCs who have long fought for their right to self-determination are seemingly meeting regularly with lobbyists who are promoting these same GMO-spreading technologies that undermine the key principle of FPIC. Gene drives are like a ‘finger-trap’ for undermining FPIC. IPLC’s should take careful note: their cooperation or consent over gene drives might well become complicity in imposing gene drive organisms on others. 

Yes, DSI threatens agreements and rights over ABS. Gene drives threaten the Biosafety Protocol and rights to FPIC.

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