Kurashi - News From Japan

Over 1,000 people participated in the Planet Diversity parade on October 15, 2010 in Nagoya. More people attended this event than two years ago in Bonn, Germany. Planet Diversity 2 years ago, during the COP9 MOP4 negotiations, the Planet Diversity Parade had some 700 participants. Here in Japan, activists, farmers, consumers, kids, invited guests from Korea, Malaysia, Canada, Australia, Sweden ... A wonderful march throught he busy streets of Nagoya, under intense police protection, with front-page newspaper coverage. Seems to me that the push for healthy, organic foods, farming without pesticides and chemical fertilizers, by farmers who care about biological diversity, rejecting patents on seeds, is gaining some tremendous momentum around the world. View as a Slide Show !

You can watch the livewebcast from the United Nations biodiversity conference on this website (this is as good as it gets): COP10/MOP5 IMC 3 documents are left late Friday night: One is clear (no square brackets) and two that still need discussion. More later. Update 7: India notes that this has been the most successful of all COP meetings. India is eagerly looking forward to welcoming you all to India in 2011. Sayonara! Update 6: At 2:20AM, the representative of the indigenous people also mentions the struggle of the people in Okinawa against the construction of a military base in the sensitive Henoko area. Update 5: Malaysia is commenting that 2 protocols have been adopted in Nagoya, including the Nagoya-Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol on the Cartagena Protocol about liability and redress in case of damage caused by genetically modified organisms. You lose some, you gain some, but Malaysia feels confident that the new treaty on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) will make sure that...

Mattias Ahren, representative of the Saami people from Northern Scandinavia, is in Nagoya to defend traditional knowledge in the ABS negotiations. Photo: Winnifred Bird, who blogs for Earth Island Journal ABS means Access and Benefit Sharing, and it may be the straw that broke the camel's back... As the Arab saying goes. Winnifred Bird notes: This Wednesday, while the pre-COP 10 biosafety conference was still mid-stride, a negotiating session began down the hall to finalize an Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The Protocol deals with genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge that's collected in one country and used in another (for example, the DNA of a plant from Brazil used to develop medicine in Canada). The press corps immediately moved camp to the hallway outside the meetings, which were cordoned off on the grounds that they were "highly sensitive." I followed, because those negotiations could v...

The webcasts from the conference about biological diversity in Nagoya are quite a good way to get a feeling for international negotiations, if that's your thing ;) They have both a live on air feed and an on demand library of videos from the main events. For example, if you want to know more about the treaty about liability and redress for genetically modified crops (we now have a new agreement that will put pressure on the biotech industry in case they cause damage to the environment or human health) please watch this video from the plenary session on Oct 16: COP-MOP5 Plenary session adopting the new liability and redress treaty (196 min, the good bit - the adoption of the treaty - starts around 118 min and there is a good speech at around 158 min) Asahi Shinbun also had this story today: GM treaty requires compensation New rules aimed at exacting compensation from businesses or organizations that allow internationally traded genetically modified crops to spread into the wild w...

Just quoting this as the mighty NHK here in Japan does not provide a record of what they report, and I think bloggers [should][may][must] try to act as a memory of things that happen that we care about: Member countries of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity remain at odds over how to share benefits derived from biological resources. A 4-day preparatory meeting ended in the central Japanese city of Nagoya on Saturday without agreement on the contentious issues. The participating countries will continue talks at the 10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties, or COP10, starting on Monday. The signatory countries were expected to discuss the issue of biological resources, with the goal of setting up international rules and adopting a protocol. They agreed on the less divisive issues. But they failed to reach a resolution on ways to prevent companies from industrialized nations from using biological resources without developing countries' permission. They were also unable to ...

Last weekend, there was a parade of some 1000-2000 people walking in central Nagoya, under severe police protection, with farmers, anti-GMO activists, housewifes and kids (many from co-ops and organic Teikei networks around Japan), as well as invited guests from South Korea, Malaysia and Canada (and Sweden). I did a quick search and found a few videos on Youtube:

Just found this gem from the BBC Editors Blog, where they try to explain why the international media has been totally absent from the UN negotiations during the past week in Nagoya. The [lack of] [lackluster] media coverage of a major international treaty having been finalized (about liability and redress issues regarding damage from genetically modified organisms) and lack of progress about the controversial topic of Access and Benefit Sharing of genetic resources (a deep divide between the resource-rich countries in the south and the north, where biotech industries want to patent and profit from said resources) is depressing. The BBC editor [explains] [cops out saying] [makes some good points but fails to get to the core of the problem that media is no longer telling people what is really going on]: The Convention on Biodiversity was established at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 with the aim of preventing the creeping extinction of the various forms of life on earth which are under th...