Crucial deal to preserve world’s ecosystems hangs in the balance at Hague UN summit

Date: 04/04/02

Some 183 countries will be represented at next week's UN summit on biodiversity. Belgian environment minister Magda Aelvoet tells Laurence Frost that disagreements over forest preservation could scupper hopes of a global agreement.

DIPLOMATS and politicians all over the world are busy this week brushing up on the basics of biodiversity - the subject of a United Nations convention whose 183 signatories meet next week in The Hague.

There it is hoped the UN's 1993 framework Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) will at last be fleshed out with binding rules and mechanisms to protect the world's ecosystems, the species that inhabit them and their genetic makeup.

Magda Aelvoet, Belgium's environment minister, is better prepared than most of her fellow ministers attending the summit.

The affable Green is one of the unsung heroes of a long-running war being waged in the name of biodiversity, by campaigners whose often-complex victories and setbacks rarely get the public attention they deserve.

In 1995, while serving as an MEP, Aelvoet helped launch a legal challenge against a controversial decision allowing the US Department of Agriculture and pharmaceuticals multinational W R Grace to patent an Indian tree.

Five years later the Munich-based European Patent Office revoked the rights, after an Indian research foundation demonstrated that the neem tree's fungicidal properties were not an American discovery, having been known to Indians for decades - if not centuries.

The May 2000 decision was hailed by environmentalists as a significant blow against 'biopiracy' by multibillion-dollar firms that conduct regular expeditions to tropical regions in search of natural remedies to patent and call their own.

But the breakthrough went almost unnoticed by the rest of the world.

'We thought we would have some beautiful big articles in the press, but all we got was three to five centimetres,' says Aelvoet, a carefully calibrated hand gesture underling her point. 'If we hadn't challenged the patent it would have meant that for 20 years Indian people would have had to pay a US company to use a remedy they had discovered themselves.'

For Aelvoet, the indifference that greeted the landmark ruling illustrates the difficulty of explaining the real significance of the UN's biodiversity convention - often overshadowed by its sexier twin, the climate change convention, and its household-name Kyoto Treaty.

'Climate change is perceived much more as an immediate threat, so mobilisation was rather easier. You had the push of public opinion that was demanding action - you don't have the same sort of push for biodiversity.

'It's smaller groups in society that are aware of the importance of keeping it.'

Under EU-backed draft guidelines to be considered by next week's sixth 'Conference of the Parties' to the CBD (COP6), industries or governments would need another country's consent to gather or use genes from its indigenous species.

Permission would be granted in exchange for 'benefit sharing' in the form of cash payments, investment or other aid to the country concerned.

Although EU ministers finally approved the guidelines only last month, most of the preparatory work was done last year under Belgium's presidency of the Union, with much cajoling from its environment minister.

Aelvoet insists buyers and sellers both have something to gain. 'It's a way of giving benefit to those that have the resources, while giving buyers the possibility of legitimate access,' she says. 'In political terms, to be portrayed as a robber or as a pirate is always worth avoiding.'

As luck would have it, Belgium has also found itself in the front line on the second major biodiversity battleground, forest preservation.

In March, Belgium blocked an incoming boatload of mahogany it suspected had been illegally felled in the Amazon, even though the shipment was accompanied by valid Brazilian export permits.

Belgium awaits the outcome of an appeal by the Brazilian government against a court decision to issue the licences even though the endangered timber was acknowledged to be illegal.

The European Commission has backed Belgium's stand with a memo urging other EU member states to investigate any suspect timber shipments.

But under international law, the EU is ultimately obliged to honour foreign export permits, even for endangered species that are known to have been harvested illegally - a loophole Aelvoet is determined to close.

'We can possibly put something in the convention text that would then become binding internationally,' she says. 'My people are thinking about how this can be done.' Where legal logging practices are concerned, Aelvoet's backing for the conciliatory stance adopted by the EU has set her apart from her usual allies at Greenpeace, the environmental campaign group.

Greenpeace has dubbed the COP6 meeting the 'Ancient Forests Summit', and is pushing for tough bans on logging in the world's large forest areas which Aelvoet says are not likely to be accepted by countries where significant timber revenues are at stake - notably Russia and Brazil. Instead, Belgium and its EU partners are advocating a deal on 'sustainable exploitation' that would include pledges to monitor logging and limit it to certain levels in defined areas, to minimise damage to forests.

'This is an approach that might be acceptable to the different parties, and which conserves large forests in the long term,' says Aelvoet. 'It means countries can keep some of the economic benefits of logging but without destroying their large forests.'

The minister says she has 'talked with Greenpeace for many, many hours', even warning that the group's unbending line could scupper the chances of a deal in The Hague.

'They can put a lot of pressure on public opinion, and through public opinion on political decision makers - and of course it will be rather easy for countries that have no forests left to respond by taking up tough positions, because it doesn't hurt their economic activities.

'But if the result is that big countries like Brazil and Russia say no to the final text then where does that get us?'

Officials from the convention's 183 member countries will launch the 13-day COP6 talks on Sunday (7 April), and conclude with a two-day ministerial on 17-18 April. August's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, will take stock of all international environmental initiatives under way - including the CBD and Kyoto Treaty - on the 10th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit which launched both processes.

But Aelvoet says a deal in The Hague is far from a foregone conclusion.

'It's not right to say I'm hopeful,' she sighs. ''Hopeful' would mean I'm optimistic. The outlook's not all that bad, but it could still go either way.'

Preview of a summit on the United Nations Convention on biodiversity which takes place at The Hague from 7-18 April 2002.