Genetic resources

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Conservation

Cannabis sativa in flower at Thimphu, Bhutan (2019). In 2020 Bhutan handled a request for cannabis seed from Dagana under its biodiversity law.

Cannabis conservation·Grow-out priorities·Populations

Threat Categories

Extinction

Genetic Threats

Genetic erosion·Genetic contamination·Introgression·Gene flow·Hybridisation·Population bottleneck·Genetic drift·Inbreeding depression

Habitat & Environmental Threats

Habitat loss

Eradication Tracking & Analysis

Eradication·Herbicide spraying of cannabis·Herbicide spraying in Mexico·Herbicide spraying in the United States·Herbicide spraying in Colombia·Herbicide spraying in Belize·Herbicide spraying in South Africa·US eradication abroad·Yukthiya·Cannabis eradication in Kirivong·Cannabis eradication in Fiji·Campaigns by country

International Enforcement

Cannabis prohibition·US eradication abroad·INCB

Legal & Policy

Farmers' rights·Access and benefit-sharing·Intellectual property·Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs·1988 Convention·Cannabis legalisation movement

Population Assessment

Minimum viable population·Population viability analysis·Effective population size

Conservation Monitoring

Population monitoring·Genetic monitoring

Conservation Methods - Ex Situ

Ex situ conservation·Gene bank·Cryopreservation·In vitro conservation·Core collection·Seed storage

Conservation Methods - In Situ

In situ conservation·On-farm conservation·Genetic reserve·Community seed bank·Feral and ruderal populations

Genetic Conservation

Germplasm·Genetic resources·Crop wild relative·Conservation genetics

Sampling & Collection

Germplasm collecting·Germplasm sampling

Preservation Strategies

Conservation prioritisation·Complementary conservation

Recovery & Restoration

Reintroduction·Genetic rescue

Conservation Science

Landrace conservation

Portal·Category

Genetic resources are genetic material of actual or potential value. The wording comes from the Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992, where genetic material is "any material of plant, animal, microbial or other origin containing functional units of heredity".^{: art. 2} The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture of 2001 uses the same formula for plants of value to food and agriculture.^{: art. 2} Under the Convention, the authority to determine access to genetic resources rests with national governments.^{: art. 15}

Neither text names Cannabis. The plant treaty's list of crops under its multilateral system leaves it out.^: 46–49 On 6 November 2026 the clearing-house of the Nagoya Protocol held eight certificates naming cannabis, from India, Bhutan and Spain. In the cannabis literature the term covers gene bank holdings, landraces and feral stands. Calling a population a genetic resource records a view of its use and does not show that anyone is keeping it.

Origin of the term and its definitions

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Biological Programme held a technical conference on plant genetic resources in Rome in 1967. Genetic Resources in Plants followed in 1970. The Crop Trust credits Otto Frankel, with Erna Bennett of the FAO, with coining "genetic resources" and "genetic erosion" at that conference.

The term in international instruments

Instrument	Year	Term	Wording
International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources (FAO)	1983	plant genetic resources	"the reproductive or vegetative propagating material" of five categories of plants
Convention on Biological Diversity	1992	genetic resources	"genetic material of actual or potential value": art. 2
International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture	2001	plant genetic resources for food and agriculture	"any genetic material of plant origin of actual or potential value for food and agriculture": art. 2
Nagoya Protocol	2010	utilization of genetic resources	"research and development on the genetic and/or biochemical composition of genetic resources": art. 2
WIPO treaty on intellectual property and genetic resources	2024	genetic resources	"genetic material of actual or potential value": art. 2

The International Undertaking of 1983, which did not bind its adherents, rested on the principle that plant genetic resources "are a heritage of mankind and consequently should be available without restriction".^{: art. 1} It had "particular reference to food crops" but covered all species of economic or social interest. It also asked governments to look for species not yet cultivated that might supply food or raw materials such as "fibres, chemical compounds, medicine or timber".^{: arts. 2.2, 3.1} FAO recognised the sovereign rights of nations in 1991. The Convention made national sovereignty a binding principle in 1992. Under the Convention, access needs mutually agreed terms and, unless the providing party decides otherwise, that party's prior informed consent.^{: art. 15} The Convention also keeps a wider term, biological resources, which takes in organisms, parts of them and populations "with actual or potential use or value for humanity".^{: art. 2}

The Nagoya Protocol adds the derivative, "a naturally occurring biochemical compound" that results from the expression or metabolism of biological or genetic resources, "even if it does not contain functional units of heredity".^{: art. 2} A contract can go further. Bhutan's scoping agreement of 2020 counts genetic information, however stored, and derivatives as genetic resources.^{: § 1} In 2024 the parties to the Convention set up the Cali Fund for benefits from the use of digital sequence information.

What counts as value

Neither the Convention nor the plant treaty sets a test for potential value. In a 2005 appraisal for the United States Department of Agriculture, Kelly Day Rubenstein and colleagues separated direct use, in producing food and fibre or creating new varieties, from option value and from the value of knowing that a resource exists or can be handed on. Option value covers later uses not yet foreseen, among them pharmaceutical and industrial ones.^: 5 The authors called crop genetic resources largely public goods, because they are easily moved and copied and legal protection has been weak, so that private incentives to keep them may fall short.^: 2

Most such material is not sold, so it has no market price to go by.^: 2–3 Breeders' contributions are hard to separate from those of the material they use, so many studies measure the two together as "genetic enhancement".^: 5 The treaties state the value in other terms. The plant treaty calls these resources "the raw material indispensable for crop genetic improvement".^: preamble The Convention's preamble speaks of the "intrinsic value" of biological diversity beside its genetic, economic and cultural values.^: preamble

How the material is classed

The Undertaking listed five categories: cultivars in use and new ones, obsolete cultivars, "primitive cultivars (land races)", wild and weedy near relatives of cultivated varieties, and special genetic stocks.^{: art. 2.1} The FAO and Bioversity passport descriptors, a widely used standard, code biological status from wild (100) through weedy (200), traditional cultivar or landrace (300), breeding or research material (400) and advanced cultivar (500) to genetically modified organism (600).^{: field 19} The same descriptors have a field for whether an accession is in the plant treaty's multilateral system.^{: field 27}

A second scheme ranks material by distance from the crop. Jack Harlan and Jan de Wet sorted the plants that can pass genes to a crop into primary, secondary and tertiary gene pools. A crop wild relative is a wild plant related to a crop, defined by such a pool or by taxonomic distance.

Holders apply these status labels to cannabis. Of 276 cannabis accessions in FAO's global register, 156 are entered as traditional cultivars or landraces, 44 as advanced cultivars, 29 as inbred lines and 17 as wild. Most of the rest have no status. The status codes have no entry for feral plants. The collection at Geneva, New York, enters 133 accessions as wild material. The records of 126 of them use the word feral.

Two systems of access

A plenary session of the diplomatic conference in Geneva in May 2024 that adopted the WIPO treaty on genetic resources.

The Convention works by separate agreements. A party providing a resource gives consent, the two sides agree terms and the benefits are shared on those terms.^{: art. 15} The rules apply to resources from their countries of origin or acquired under the Convention.^{: art. 15.3} Access and benefit-sharing is the general term for this arrangement. Under the Nagoya Protocol, a permit posted on its clearing-house counts as an internationally recognised certificate of compliance, which is evidence that the resource it covers was accessed with consent and on agreed terms.^{: art. 17}

The plant treaty pools a named set of crops in place of separate agreements. Its multilateral system covers the crops listed in Annex I, chosen for food security and for how far countries depend on one another for them.^{: art. 11} Access is for research, breeding and training for food and agriculture. That purpose "does not include chemical, pharmaceutical and/or other non-food/feed industrial uses". For a crop with food and non-food uses, its importance for food security decides whether it is included.^{: art. 12.3} Recipients may not claim intellectual property that limits access to the material in the form received.^{: art. 12.3} The WIPO treaty of 2024 asks patent applicants to disclose the country of origin or source of genetic resources on which a claimed invention is based.^{: art. 3} Article 9 of the plant treaty leaves the realising of Farmers' rights to national governments. Nothing in it limits any right farmers have under national law to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seed.^{: art. 9}

At its session in Lima in 2025 the treaty's Governing Body took note of a compromise proposal from its chair, which included an amendment to Annex I and an expert group on expanding it. The proposal passed to its twelfth session.

The two systems do not bind the same countries. The United States joined the plant treaty in 2017 and has not ratified the Convention. Russia has been a party to the Convention since 1995 and is not a party to the plant treaty or the Nagoya Protocol. The cannabis collections at Geneva (696 accessions) and at the Vavilov Institute in Saint Petersburg (491) lie in those two countries.

Cannabis under these instruments

The words cannabis and hemp do not appear in the Convention, the Nagoya Protocol, the plant treaty or the WIPO treaty. No Cannabis entry stands among the food crops and forages of Annex I.^: 46–49 The article 2 definition in the plant treaty names no plant. The treaty does not say whether cannabis material counts under it. In FAO's register, 256 of the 276 cannabis accessions are entered as outside the multilateral system and 14 have no entry. The other six, all from the gene bank at Suceava in Romania, are entered as inside it.

India supplies six of the eight certificates on the clearing-house. Each records approval by the National Biodiversity Authority for intellectual property on an invention that uses the plant: a pest-control formulation (2017), a herbal extract for yersiniosis (2020), an extract of leaf named as "Bhang/Ganja" for anti-proliferative compounds (2021), a 27-plant composition against coronavirus (2021), a wood polish with hemp-seed oil (2022) and a composite reinforced with natural fibres (2022). A seventh records non-commercial access to Cannabis sativa, with Spain's plant genetic resources centre as provider, valid from December 2022 to January 2023.

Drujegang in Dagana District, Bhutan (2009). The agreement of 2020 names Pangserpo in Drugeygang gewog as the source of its seed.

The eighth is an agreement of 2020 between Bhutan's National Biodiversity Centre and the Dutch firm Bedrocan. The agreement gave access to seed of one sample, no. 38, high in cannabidiol and collected at Pangserpo in Dagana, to develop homozygous germplasm in a two-year scoping phase.^{: §§ 3.1, 6.1, 9.1} Bhutan was to have free use of that germplasm and Bedrocan a right of first refusal on commercial applications. Benefit-sharing was left to a later agreement. Bedrocan was to pay US$5,000 towards conserving biological resources and to facilitate measures to conserve the resource it received.^{: §§ 5.1, 6.2, 6.4, 7.3}

National drug law can govern the same material. Lebanon's first report under the Nagoya Protocol states that access to and use of "cannabis resources" for medical and industrial purposes fall under its Law No. 178/2020 on cannabis cultivation. Matthew Welling and colleagues named the limits on moving seed between parties to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances as one barrier to a shared physical collection. How those limits have affected holdings is treated under germplasm and ex situ conservation.

Populations called a resource

Welling and colleagues reviewed collections and called exotic germplasm "a genetic resource" not highly selected for a given trait or growing environment. John McPartland and Ernest Small named four taxa, the drug-type domesticates of South and Central Asia and their wild relatives, calling them "critically endangered reservoirs of germplasm" from which modern cannabinoid strains came. In their view, naming the taxa also provides "prior art" against claims in utility patents. Ademola Aina and colleagues valued American feral plants for breeding regionally adapted hemp cultivars that comply with the law. The agreement with Bhutan concerned a sample chosen for its cannabidiol content.^{: § 3.1}

Aina and colleagues gathered seed and tissue from 1,821 plants in 91 populations for the federal repository at Geneva, which they said would secure "these genetic resources" against future political or social pressure. Tori Ford and colleagues called the Midwestern stands "a top priority for conservation efforts" and used their habitat models to guide further collecting. McPartland and Small ranked in situ conservation as preferable in general and seed banks as the immediate priority for cannabis. Clarke and Merlin wrote in 2016 that "there really is no reliable reserve of Cannabis seeds".

What the sources do not establish

The clearing-house certificates show access approved and terms agreed. They do not show that the stand at Pangserpo, or any stand behind the Indian patent filings, is being kept. Bedrocan's fee was for a general fund and the agreement names no specific measure for that population. The certificate has expired, with no result of the scoping phase posted on the clearing-house.

Only parties to the Protocol post certificates. The United States and Russia are not parties, so the eight are no count of all access to the plant. The FAO register does not explain the six Suceava entries. Rubenstein and colleagues do not treat the plant. None of these sources puts a price on a cannabis population. Aina and colleagues, Ford and colleagues and McPartland and Small judge populations valuable for use. None of them measures that value in money or follows those populations over time.

See also

• Access and benefit-sharing
• Cannabis ruderalis
• Crop wild relative
• Ex situ conservation
• Farmers' rights
• Feral and ruderal Cannabis
• Gene bank
• Gene pool
• Genetic diversity
• Genetic erosion
• Germplasm
• In situ conservation
• Intellectual property
• Landrace Cannabis