UNEP's Responses - Bio-safety Protocol

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UNEP's RESPONSES -
Bio-safety Protocol

Cartagena Protocol On Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity was adopted at the Conference of the Parties at the Resumed session of its First Extraordinary meeting held in Montreal, Canada, from 24 to 29 January 2000.

Under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, governments will signal whether or not they are willing to accept imports of agricultural commodities that include LMOs by communicating their decision to the world community via an Internet-based Biosafety Clearing House. In addition, shipments of these commodities that may contain LMOs are to be clearly labelled.

Stricter Advanced Informed Agreement procedures will apply to seeds, live fish, and other LMOs that are to be intentionally introduced into the environment. In these cases, the exporter must provide detailed information to each importing country in advance of the first shipment, and the importer must then authorize the shipment. The aim is to ensure that recipient countries have both the opportunity and the capacity to assess risks involving the products of modern biotechnology.

To visit the biosafety protocol web site, click here: http://www.biodiv.org/biosafety/.

An Interactive forum on Agrobiodiversity was established by UNEP to facilitate experts’ input to the preparation of an Operational Programme on Agrobiodiversity paper under the Global Environmental Facility. The Universal Resource Locator of this forum is: http://gef-forum.unep.org.

Last Update: 10 August, 2001