Biotechnology, IPRs and Biodiversity

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CONVENTION ON BIODIVERSITY

The Convention on Biodiversity has 42 articles in all. Roughly the first half of the articles contain important provisions and the latter half of the articles may be loosly termed as machinery provisions. In our view, the convention is very important—it undoubtedly provides a much broader canvass than that obtained by simply focusing on issues traditionally associated with the field of Conservation Biology. It draws attention to the fact that the maintenance of biodiversity touches on many aspects of human activities and concerns much more than how to prevent individual species from becoming extinct (in contrast to some of the earlier agreements which dealt with specific species), or the provision of nature reserves ...