A United Nations fund set up in 2024 to make companies share profits from the genetic data of plants, animals and microbes has collected just $10,588 from five small companies, after the COP17 biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, put off its key rules until 2028, Mongabay India reported. The Cali Fund, named after the Colombian city where it was agreed, had been expected to raise around $1 billion a year.
The money is meant to come from companies that use digital sequence information (DSI), the genetic data stored in open online databases, which is used in fields from crop breeding to medicine. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, the benefits of using genetic resources must be shared with the countries and communities they come from, but a decade after countries first agreed to discuss DSI, little has been shared.
COP17, which ended on 31 October, was expected to decide which companies should pay and how much, whether payments should depend on how much DSI a company uses, how the databases can be made accountable to all countries, and how the money should be divided among countries and communities. Instead the questions were deferred to COP18. "The goalpost has now shifted to COP18," said Nithin Ramakrishnan, a senior researcher at the Third World Network.
The biggest sticking point was certificates. Companies, including some from the Global South, want a certificate confirming that their payment covers their use of DSI, giving them legal certainty. But firms obtain public genetic data through many routes, and confirming that every sequence was legally accessed is very hard or impossible, said Siva Thambisetty, an associate professor at the London School of Economics who helped design the payment threshold adopted at COP16. Much of the time between the summits, she said, went on issues industry raised as conditions for paying in.
Experts remain divided on the fix, and the communities that protect biodiversity, such as tribal groups that keep traditional seed varieties, have yet to receive any money from the fund.
Source: Mongabay India (reported by Aditi Tandon)
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