ABSTRACT
The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) establishes a multilateral system of access and benefit sharing (multilateral system), which pools together material from national, regional and international gene banks. 1 It consists of a global pool of genes from 64 major crops and forages, which may be obtained for utilization and conservation in research, breeding and training, on the basis of a standard contract agreed multilaterally. The multilateral system can be seen as the most integrated and collective way of managing globally and in a coordinated way a distributed pool of genetic resources. In this regard, the multilateral system could be seen as the most advanced expression of the willingness and need for global cooperation on the management, conservation and distribution of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA).
