The fight against biopiracy and its injustice was the main impetus for the push to have an international treaty to be developed under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The Convention's third objective of fair and equitable sharing of the benefits from the utilization of genetic resources is itself the result of tough negotiation in the early 1990s when the misappropriation, even theft, of the resources of developing countries and of indigenous peoples and local communities gained international attention.

Several examples of the uncontrolled spread of genetically engineered plants into wild populations and ecosystems have been documented: cotton in Mexico, oilseed rape in North America, Japan, Switzerland and Australia and grasses in the USA. There are also cases of repeated transgene presence in landraces or local varieties of crop plants such as maize in Mexico and rice in China.

Report submitted to the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in preparation for SBSTTA 12 (July 2007, Paris, France).

Executive Summary

This document focuses on particular types of ‘biofuel’ which we prefer to call agrofuel because of the intensive, industrial way it is produced, generally as monocultures, often covering thousands of hectares, most often in the global South.