Survey alert: Access and Benefit Sharing for in situ plant genetic materials and crop wild relatives in the SADC region

Date: 29 October 2020

The Darwin Initiative project “Bridging Agriculture and Environment: the Southern African Crop Wild Relatives Network” aims at establishing strategic partnerships/networks of protected areas for Crop wild relatives (CWR) conservation and use. The project is also aimed at designing mechanisms to enhance benefits from conserving CWR; and increase access to germplasm including building gendered capacity underpinning southern-African food security and poverty reduction. CWR are wild species related to our cultivated plants that have potential sources of traits that may be beneficial to crops. They may also contain adapted genes that can be very useful for coping with climate change and other changes in environmental conditions. These are particularly important raw materials for crop improvement. They are generally not managed actively by farmers as part of their agricultural production systems and do not include crop diversity managed on-farm. This short survey is aimed at gathering experiences and perceptions on different access and benefit sharing regimes in partner countries and the institutional networks for ABS with the aim of harmonizing ABS across the region and establishing a network for sharing in situ genetic resources (of wild plant species) including CWRs. The survey will target people actively engaged in the management, conservation and use of the genetic resources (such as managers of protected areas and breeders) as well as policy makers involved in the implementation of global policy instruments such as the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources (IT), Nagoya protocol and Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). To take part of the survey, please visit: forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx