Biocultural community protocols for livestock keepers
Partly because of this disregard by policymakers, many livestock keepers face enormous
problems of access to resources – they are squeezed out of their ancestral habitats due to
competition for their land by general population pressure, promotion of crop cultivation,
establishment of wildlife reserves, “land-grabbing”, and so on. The arrival of industrial
animal production systems makes it even more difficult for them to remain competitive
(FAO, 2009a).
Yet, the interest in local breeds is increasing, due to climate change, questions of global
food security as well as their promise for specialty products (LPP et al., 2010).
Livestock keepers that manage their animals as part of the local ecosystem also fall into the
domain of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. They represent indigenous and local
communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable
use of biological diversity that are described in Article 8j of the Convention. Therefore
they are entitled to respect and support for their lifestyles by signatories to the Convention.
However, so far livestock keepers have not invoked their rights under this legal provision
and remained invisible to the bodies and working groups that direct, supervise and monitor
the implementation of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, such as the Ad-Hoc
Working Group on Article 8j and the Working Group on Access and Benefit Sharing.
“Biocultural community protocols” are an emerging approach that can help to rectify this
unsatisfactory situation. There is the high likelihood that they will become a part of the
Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing that is expected to be adopted during the
Conference of the Parties 10 of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in October,
2010 in Nagoya, Japan.
The purpose of this publication is to contextualize biocultural protocols in the debate about
the implementation of the Global Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources and the
United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, to analyse the existing, still limited
experiences with the development of biocultural community protocols, and to discuss the
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of this new tool, as well as recommendations how to take it forward.
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