The U.N. world food body reached a landmark agreement on July 1 to try to save the world's diversity of agricultural crops.
The pact followed an anguished debate pitting many poor countries and environmentalists against multinational corporations and wealthier nations.
Delegates said the United States had agreed for the first time in a public forum to mandatory payments by plant breeders and geneticists developing new crop varieties in return for access to public seed banks.
The seed banks lend out crop seeds at no charge, enabling research into new varieties of plants to increase resistance to disease and ameliorate some of the impact of global warming.
In turn, this helps alleviate hunger in poorer nations.
"This international undertaking is a milestone: it will allow the conservation of genetic resources for future generations," said Jose Esquinas-Alcazar, secretary of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, part of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
According to Esquinas-Alcazar, such an international agreement to conserve plant genetic resources was needed because agricultural biodiversity is being lost at an alarming rate.
He estimated that over time some 10,000 plant species had been used for human food and agriculture, but now no more than 120 cultivated species provide 90 per cent of human food supplied by plants.
Representatives of 161 countries reached the agreement by consensus early on July 1 at FAO's headquarters in Rome after tough haggling over the details.
But a separate, core issue over the patenting of seeds, where rich and poor nations differ most, failed to be resolved.
This issue will be addressed by an FAO conference in November.
The agreement, encompassing 34 nutritional crop groups and 39 forage crop groups, underlined the need to protect farmers' rights, enabling them to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seed.
Until now, seed exchanges have operated informally on the principle of "common heritage" , an agreement that they are a shared international resource.
According to delegates, FAO's November conference is expected to adopt the agreement reached on July 1, which will then be submitted to national governments for ratification.
Source: Reuters