Talk:Genetic resources

Talk

Discussion for: Genetic resources • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Genetic resources covers the term: where it came from, how the international instruments define it, how value and classes are assigned, the two systems of access, how cannabis stands under them, and what calling a population a resource does and does not show. What germplasm is and how it is kept belongs to Germplasm. Holders and their holdings belong to Gene bank. Storage belongs to Ex situ conservation and keeping populations where they grow to In situ conservation. Measures of variation belong to Genetic diversity. The law of benefit-sharing, farmers' rights and patents belongs to Access and benefit-sharing, Farmers' rights and Intellectual property.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

• Instruments: FAO Conference Resolution 8/83, the International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources (1983), articles 1 to 3; Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), preamble and articles 2 and 15; International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (2001), preamble, articles 2, 9, 11 and 12, Annex I; Nagoya Protocol (2010), articles 2 and 17; WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (2024), articles 2 and 3; Conference of the Parties decision 16/2 (2024).
• Standards and records: FAO/Bioversity Multi-Crop Passport Descriptors V.2.1 (2015), fields 19 and 27; FAO's Global Information System and GRIN-Global for cannabis accessions, both as they stood on 6 November 2026; the Access and Benefit-sharing Clearing-House for certificates and for Lebanon's first national report; the Bhutan scoping agreement posted there.
• General works: Engels and Ebert (2021), Plants 10: 1557; Rubenstein and colleagues (2005), USDA Economic Information Bulletin 2; Harlan and de Wet (1971), Taxon 20: 509–517; Engels and Thormann (2020), Plants 9: 968; the Crop Trust's article on Otto Frankel.
• Cannabis: Welling and colleagues (2016), Frontiers in Plant Science 7: 1113; McPartland and Small (2020), PhytoKeys 144: 81–112; Clarke and Merlin (2016), Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences 35: 293–327; Aina and colleagues (2025), Scientific Reports 15: 20423; Ford and colleagues (2024), Ecology and Evolution 14: e11325.

Who coined the term

The credit to Frankel and Bennett is the Crop Trust's. Engels and Ebert record the 1967 conference and the 1970 book without naming anyone as the coiner of the term.

Cannabis and Annex I

Annex I names genera, and Cannabis is not among them. Article 2 of the plant treaty defines plant genetic resources for food and agriculture by their value and names no plant, so its text settles the annex and leaves open whether a given cannabis lot falls under the general definition. Article 12.3(a) excludes chemical, pharmaceutical and other non-food or feed industrial uses from facilitated access, for the crops the system covers.

Six accessions at Suceava are entered in FAO's register with the status "Included" for the multilateral system: SVGB-11606, 16050, 16408, 14928, 16044 and 16045. The status is the holder's entry. Nothing in the register explains it, and it does not fit the annex as printed.

The clearing-house certificates

The clearing-house lists nine certificates matching cannabis or hemp. One of them names Crotalaria juncea, sun hemp, which is a different plant, so the article counts eight. One Indian certificate names Cannabis indica with the vernacular "Gaanja" and the others Cannabis sativa. The Indian certificates call the material bioresources or biological resources, and several concern leaf or seed oil; none says whether the invention used the plant's genetic material or only its chemistry. The Convention's term for the wider class is biological resources.

The Spanish certificate gives Cannabis sativa as its subject and non-commercial as its use, with the recipient confidential.

The Bhutan certificate is listed as expired. Its dates are 6 January 2020 to 5 January 2022. Neither it nor the agreement reports what came of the scoping phase, or whether the sample was supplied or the fee paid.

Accessions entered as wild

Field 19 of the passport descriptors has codes for wild and weedy material and none for feral. GRIN-Global uses its own terms, among them "Wild material". Most of the Geneva accessions so entered are feral hemp collected in the United States. A whole-genome study (Ren and colleagues 2021) holds that wild-growing plants it sampled are escapes from cultivation, which is treated under Gene pool.

The word in institution names

"Genetic Resources" also occurs in the names of the N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources, the Plant Genetic Resources Unit at Geneva, the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation, the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, the journal Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution and FAO's Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Such names are not statements that a given population has value.

Value and conservation

Aina and colleagues and Ford and colleagues write about collecting feral hemp for a repository. McPartland and Small call for collection and conservation of landraces in their centres of diversity and rank seed banks as the immediate priority. Each treats a population as valuable for a purpose: compliant hemp cultivars in the first two, the ancestry of drug cultivars in the third. None reports a measure taken where the population grows.