Peter Efande
21 January 2004
Yaounde — Environmental experts met in Yaounde last week to explore ways of establishing a legal framework to regulate access and benefit sharing in the use of products of biodiversity in the country. The workshop was jointly organised by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MINEF) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
The concept of "Access and Benefit Sharing" (ABS) comes out of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), one of the main products of the Rio 1992 United Nations conference on Environment and Development. The government of Cameroon is committed to the convention (CBD) which it ratified in 1994. What ABS implies is putting in place regulatory mechanisms for managing the use and exploitation of genetic resources as provided for by the convention. CBD has three main objectives, namely: biodiversity conservation, sustainable use and access and benefit sharing.
Opening the workshop, the representative of the Minister of Environment and Forestry underscored the need to put in place a regulatory framework to ensure access and equitable distribution of wealth accruing from the sustainable management of Cameroon's rich biological diversity. The minister's representative said the country's genetic resources has increasingly become a prime source for international biodiversity, but regretted that its contribution to local livelihoods and to the national economy as a whole, has not been fully maximized. Speaking earlier, the director of policy at the WWF Central Africa Regional Headquarters in Yaounde, Mrs Estherine Fotabong said this state of affairs revolves around the gap that exists between the existing national legal framework for control of access to and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from genetic resource use and international standards as per access and benefit sharing. She cited the case of the famous AIDS vine (Ancistrocladus Kornpensis) which foreign scientists collected from the Korup National Park without due royalties to Cameroon and its people.
Mrs Fotabong concluded that the workshop was, "the start of a dialogue in which WWF is bringing in some technical assistance to MINEF to draw up a legal framework on ABS based on national and international case studies."
Participants discussed issues related to international legal framework for ABS, the CBD and Bonn Guidelines; and legal and institutional measures to control access and promote benefit sharing from the products of Cameroon's rich biodiversity.
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