President Murmu to inaugurate global meet to discuss future of farmers rights on September 12

Subject: Environment

Section: International conventions

In the news:

President Droupadi Murmu will inaugurate the global symposium on farmers’ rights organized by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) in New Delhi.

About the Global Symposium on Farmers’ Rights:

Organized by: Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Authority, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources.
Organised at: ICAR Convention Centre, NASC Complex, New Delhi.
Main aim of the symposium: Participating countries to deliberate upon the pivotal issues related to Farmers’ Rights as enshrined in Article 9 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
- Article 9 of the International Treaty on farmers’ rights provides for the recognition, realization, and promotion of farmers’ rights relating to plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.
Objective:
- Increased knowledge and awareness of farmers’ rights, shared and disseminated measures, best practices, experiences and lessons learned.
- To enhance the understanding of the “interconnectedness of farmers’ rights and human rights”
Expected to contribute to understanding the challenges and opportunities of implementing farmers’ rights around the globe.
A proposal for future work on farmers’ rights, including improving the inventory and charting the possible work to be done, is expected to be considered at the symposium.
Discussions on the possible impact of digital sequence information and genetic sequence data on farmers’ rights.

Digital sequence information (DSI):

Digital sequence information (DSI) is a placeholder term used in international policy fora, particularly the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), to refer to data derived from de-materialized genetic resources.
The 2018 Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on DSI reached consensus that the term was “not appropriate”.
Nevertheless, the term is generally agreed to include nucleic acid sequence data, and may be construed to include other data types derived from or linked to dematerialized genetic resources, including, for example, protein sequence data.
DSI is crucial to research in a wide range of contexts, including public health, medicine, biodiversity, plant and animal breeding, and evolution research.