“Tonga signed international treaty that promotes sustainable global food security” ^Featured

PGRFA is defined as “any genetic material of plant origin of actual or potential value for food and agriculture.”

Signing the treaty would give Tonga access to the genetic resources for food, and allows future generations to access the genetic diversity that is essential for food production and agriculture.

Tonga is already party to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) by accession on 17 August 1998; and also party to the Cartagena Protocol (CP) by accession on 17 December 2003.

Tonga’s Deputy Director of MAFFF, Mr. Sione Foliaki said: “This means more vegetables and fruits including root crops planting materials – like seeds, bulbs, stems, branches, leaves, cuttings, etc. - could be accessed by Tonga from any source/center of origin… We can access via the Treaty’s multi-sharing mechanisms.”

Tonga officially became the 134th contracting party to the treaty on 16 March 2015, thanks to the technical support from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

Ministers of Agriculture in the Pacific region endorsed a call in 2012 to support Pacific Island countries and territories that had not yet ratified the Treaty to do so.

Other contracting parties from the southwest Pacific are Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Palau, and Samoa.

Countries in the region that have not yet signed the Treaty include Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Nauru, Niue, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

Secretary of the International Treaty, Dr Shakeel Bhatti, said: “The Kingdom of Tonga will be eligible to participate in both monetary and non-monetary benefit-sharing mechanisms, including initiatives on technology transfer, capacity building, and value added information about food crops from the Treaty’s Global Information System on Plant Genetic Resources.”

Dr Bhatti said that other countries in the Pacific would be signing the Treaty later. “With their accession, they will join the Treaty’s multilateral system, a global gene pool of more than 1.6 million accessions of the most important food plants.”

Director of SPC’s Land Resources Division, Inoke Ratukalou, said: “We can no longer work in isolation, and the Treaty provides security as a tool for long-term food and nutrition security in our Pacific region. Many of the crops and much of the food we use come from outside our countries.”

Mr. Ratukalou also said: “In light of the global disasters and climate change, its important that our countries have the adaptive capacity and resilient agricultural systems provided through access to more resilient crops from the global gene pool.”

ENDS

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