The Moving Scope of Annex 1

The multilateral system of access and benefit sharing (multilateral system) of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) is currently limited in scope to the list of 64 food and forage crops included in Annex 1 of the Treaty. ¹ On the one hand, the existence of a finite list of crops logically follows from the agreement to establish a multilateral system and was reached rather early in the negotiations on the Treaty. This multilateral system needed to be defined and limited, and the list helped provide a solution to this problem. On the other hand, the negotiations of the contents of the list itself reflect how perspectives on access and benefit sharing differed between regions and how these different perspectives resulted in divergent views on the composition of the list. In this sense, the negotiations of the content of the list represented a microcosm of the larger political and legal debates that were so central to the negotiations of the ITPGRFA.