•  united nations
• Thursday, May 12, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Eight new countries have signed onto the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing. In a signing ceremony on Wednesday, representatives of Guatemala, Indonesia, South Africa, India, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, and Tunisia signed the supplementary agreement to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Fourteen others signed the Nagoya-Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol.

These countries joined the thirteen others who have already signed the document since its opening in February 2011. 'The fact that it has been opened for signature less than 3 months, and . . . we have until now 13 countries that have signed, is of major political significance,' said Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

The agreement was adopted in October 2010 in Nagoya, Japan, during the tenth meeting of the Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The next meeting, COP 11, will be held in India next year. In light of their hosting roles, both Hideki Minamikawa, Japan’s Vice Minister of the Environment, and Tishya Chatterjee, India’s Minister of Environment and Forests, spoke at the signing ceremony.

They were joined by Environment Ministers from around the world, who gathered at the United Nations Wednesday for the high-level segment of the 19th round of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-19).

'It is fitting that while the Commission on Sustainable Development is meeting . . we have this signing ceremony,' Djoghlaf said, noting that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has considered the Nagoya Protocol to be one of the most important legal instruments for achieving sustainable development.

Chatterjee said that Japanese companies are already implementing an Access and Benefit-sharing (ABS) framework in India. 'They are registering and paying the royalty. Ratification is just a formality,' he said. 'The market is already responding to ABS.'

While Japan is working to ratify the protocol, Minamikawa hopes that other countries will do the same. 'I expect many countries will follow us,' he said.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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