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Prime concern: Biodiversity
Last word:
Chris Gayle |
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Natural disharmony By Suresh Dharur
It is virtually a race against time. The task of conservation of biodiversity in the face of man-made ecological degradation poses several daunting challenges including resource-mobilisation, protection of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) of the local communities and harmonising the conflicting interests between development and conservation. As over 8,000 delegates from 193 countries gathered at Hyderabad for the United Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to deliberate on strategies for conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and regulated access to genetic resources, several questions came to the fore. IPR protection For India, hosting the 11th Conference of Parties (COP-11) to the CBD, a plethora of challenges stare in its face, key among them being protection of IPRs for its traditional knowledge and biological resources. Being one of the world's 12 mega-biodiversity centres with rich flora and fauna, India has been a victim of bio-piracy. There have been several cases of its unique genetic resources being plundered and misappropriated. The long patent battles over "neem" and "haldi" illustrate the enormity of the task for a country that takes pride in its traditional knowledge. Biological diversity denotes the totality and variety of living organisms on Earth and is usually classified at three levels — genes, species and ecosystems. There is growing recognition that biological diversity is a global asset of tremendous value to present and future generations.
Though India signed the 2010 Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS), it is yet to ratify the protocol because of its concerns over IPR issues. It was at India's insistence that the Hyderabad conference took note of the issue of involving local communities in devising laws pertaining to genetically modified (GM) organisms. The member countries at COP resolved to consider the voice of local communities before deciding on GM organisms. The meeting of Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety gave a call to involve indigenous communities before deciding on GM technologies. It was also decided to set up an international ad hoc expert committee to decide on economic considerations of the people involved. The group will consist of 40 members from five regions of the world. While this development is seen as a vindication of India's stand, its own record on safeguarding bio-diversity, traditional knowledge and interests of the local communities is far from satisfactory. National Biodiversity Authority India is among a few countries to have enacted biodiversity law in 2002. The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) was established in 2003 under this Act. The NBA is also mandated to ensure equitable sharing of benefits arising out of the use of these resources and knowledge to the country and the people. As of 2011, the NBA has approved 607 cases for access, IPR and transfer of research results. Of these, 437 were permissions for applying for IPRs. However, the NBA's access and benefit sharing agreements frequently come under fire from critics for not involving the local people. As many as 100 such agreements have been signed since 2006, which is a world record. Environmentalists have been raising objections over the current policy of allowing the NBA to screen IPR applications based on India's biological wealth and intellectual heritage. Even a decade after enacting the biodiversity law, India is still struggling to do a balancing act of punishing multinationals who indulge in bio-piracy and providing the private sector with an access to the rich biodiversity in the interests of science. Bio-piracy The latest case against the Maharashtra Hybrid Corporation (Mahyco) regarding Bt brinjal becomes the country's first-ever bio-piracy criminal case against a private company. The charge against Mahyco is that it was developing Bt brinjal by using a local variety's germplasm. There is growing opposition to the government allowing open research access of germplasm. Questions are being asked whether the NBA has been effective in protecting farmers from multinationals. Though the biodiversity Act was meant to provide for the conservation of biological diversity, the reality check shows that it has been ineffective. Experts say the Act does not take a clear position on IPRs and there has been no instance of it invoking powers to oppose the grant of IPR in any foreign country on biological resources. Many states have evinced no interest in constituting Biodiversity Management Committees. Economic crisis The global economic crisis has also cast a shadow over the meet, raising doubts whether the member countries will be able to mobilise resources to meet the targets of biodiversity conservation. However, the Union Minister for Environment and Forests Jayanthi Natarajan exuded confidence that the countries would raise investments in biodiversity. A look at the status of implementation of goals regarding bio-diversity conservation reveals that not much is being done. Only 14 out of 193 countries, who are signatories to the 2010 Nagoya protocol on protection of endangered species and habitats, have actually ratified it. As per the targets fixed at the Nagoya meet, it was agreed to reduce the loss of natural habitats by 50 per cent and increase the area of the world's land taken up by nature reserves to 17 per cent by 2020. The Aichi biodiversity targets also called for marine protected zones to increase from 1 per cent of the world's seas to 10 per cent by 2020. Clash of interests The Association of Biotechnology-Led Enterprises (ABLE) argued that restrictions on GM crops would impede progress. “Scaremongers have to be dealt with strictly. Risk management is important,” said Dr N Seetharaman, executive director of ABLE. Dwelling upon conditions in India, Neema Pathak Broome, a member of Kalpavriksh, an NGO in Pune, said legislation on fresh water conservation was lagging. “In India there is a need for formation of laws aiming at conserving fresh water and marine biodiversity. We have many laws for forest conservation, she said. Seeking to harmonise conflicting interests, Jayanthi Natarajan called for science-based regulation on the safe use of LMOs while acknowledging the reservations and concerns over their long-term impact on ecology and conservation.
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Last word:
Chris Gayle West Indies’ Twenty20 World Cup win makes for a fine story of courage, hope and resurgence, and Gayle was the game changer
If West Indies had lost, Gayle’s three runs would have become a millstone on his chest, leading to suspicion, debate and innuendo. For how the heck can anyone — let alone Chris Gayle, who makes runs at the rate of 145 every 100 balls in T20 Internationals — score just three runs off 16 balls in Twenty20 cricket? Ironically, Gayle’s fair name was saved due to the efforts of Marlon Samuels, a man who was once banned for two years for consorting with the cricket’s underworld, the bookies. Samuels, a gifted batsman who is now 31 and will never realise his great potential, and his captain Darren Sammy took their team to a score that proved too much for the Sri Lankans.
Mere shadows Sammy, like the greatest West Indians of the past, plays his cricket with a smile and an amateur’s abandon. He’s a nice man, but by no stretch of imagination could he be called a leader of genius. But in these difficult times, when their cricket board and players are in constant strife, when West Indian players are but shadows of the men who came before them, Sammy will do. So would the Twenty20 World Cup win, though it must not be likened to their past victories. It makes for a fine story, of courage and hope and a resurgence, but it also is a story most untrue. It’s not the same World Cup they won 33 years ago — heck, it’s hardly the same world, and most certainly not the same sport. In four Twenty20 World Cups, we’ve had four different winners. We’ve had six different finalists, out of a maximum possible of eight. Clearly, Twenty20 cricket evens up the field. Its brevity razes the wall between the pedestrian and the great. It makes cricket more democratic — in the abbreviated format, an average player can compete with a great player. “Now everyone can hit sixers. The boundaries are not that big and with better bats, everyone has a chance to clear the boundary,” Gayle told this correspondent once. In academics, the best students want the question paper to be very tough, because that’s the only way they can be separated from the duffers. Twenty20 punishes the geniuses by yoking them with the commonplace. Not that Gayle isn’t a genius — he’s a genius of the highest order, with amazing hand-eye coordination, ability to hit the ball with great power and timing. He’s also capable of playing very long innings, as his two triple centuries in Test cricket show. He’s brave iconoclastic, for long in conflict with figures of authority, first with the senior cricketers when he came in, then with West Indies cricket officials.
No love lost for Test cricket Gayle, along with Kevin Pietersen, is also the best rebuttal to the fond, naive notion that athletes are “playing for the nation”. In 2009, in an amazing interview with the Guardian newspaper, Gayle said for all he cared, Test cricket can go to a corner and die. “I wouldn’t be so sad if Test cricket died out,” he said. Incidentally, in the recording of the interview, Gayle seems a bit tipsy and at one point, seems to be flirting with the female reporter. Drunk or not, Gayle did opt to play for the Bangalore IPL team rather than for West Indies after that, though he then opted to play for West Indies rather than Somerset last year. Twenty20 cricket, which has lesser effort put in, and has greater toleration of failure, is attractive to the laidback. Gayle, wearer of gold and fluorescent shades and clothing, is laidback, often called the coolest man in cricket. In Twenty20, the sponsors are focusing more on monetising cricketers at events than performance, and a party atmosphere prevails — three women were arrested from Gayle’s room in Sri Lanka. Before the final, a West Indian player, with a laugh, told a journalist their strategy against Sri Lanka: “We’ve got five girls coming up tonight.”
And then there’s the money. Gayle has earned more from the IPL than he would have earned in two lifetimes playing for West Indies. It’s possible to sympathise with Gayle — the West Indies Cricket Board doesn’t pay much, and he once had to give up a personal sponsorship deal because the WICB had signed up a deal with a rival telecom company. And at 33, the road ahead in his career is shorter than the one already travelled. He’d better look after his own interests because no one else will. And it’s not that the ‘real’ great West Indians of the previous generation didn’t choose money over pride. The recent, acclaimed documentary “Fire in Babylon” charts and analyses the rise of the Black power in world cricket in the 1970s-80s; how men from the Caribbean islands channeled the anger of the colonised and the enslaved into ferocious cricket. Yet, most of them also chose to abandon their beloved black team to go to Australia and play private cricket for a white man, Kerry Packer. Some went and played even in the apartheid era South Africa. When American billionaire Allen Stanford — subsequently jailed for 110 years for a massive fraud in the US — set up his Twenty20 cricket league, players no less than Viv Richards and Garry Sobers walked in his wake. That’s the power of money. And Gayle too is flesh and blood. The excellence of sportspersons makes us forget that, makes us invest notions of nobleness and patriotism into their simple act of hitting a ball. For all his amazing powers, Gayle remains human. Sammy, Samuels and the others are much, much more human. They’ve won the Twenty20 World Cup, but it’s a Cup everyone will win. The one good it can do is inspire young people in the West Indies to play the game.
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