by Nithin Ramakrishnan (Third World Network)
As CBD COP17 opens, the Cali Fund is celebrated as a breakthrough in biodiversity finance, despite limited contributions from DSI users. Behind the celebrations lies a question of justice: who is paying for what, and who is being asked to make concessions? The Cali Fund is the financial arm of the CBD’s multilateral mechanism, established to address inequities in benefit-sharing from DSI. Its success must be measured not only by the revenue it raises for biodiversity, but by whether it prevents digital biopiracy and ensures that provider countries and communities can participate in and benefit from scientific progress.
Decision 16/2 requires Parties with DSI users in their jurisdictions, mostly developed countries, to incentivize them to contribute to the Cali Fund. Yet the COP17 draft decision proposes recognition of Cali Fund certificates by DSI provider countries as the main incentive, without mentioning incentives user countries could offer. While calling the Fund a “major innovation in global biodiversity finance”, developed countries are in effect shifting responsibility for incentivizing private-sector contributions to developing countries. Meanwhile, developed countries are falling short of their obligations to provide financial resources to developing countries, with target 19(a) of the KMGBF not met.
Decision 16/2 also calls on Parties sponsoring or hosting sequence databases to ensure databases implement the decision. Database accountability and transparency to all Parties are essential for legal certainty, including whether DSI was lawfully published and used. Monetary contributions cannot legitimize unlawfully published DSI or exempt users from non-monetary obligations or requirements for prior informed consent from Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Yet, rather than ensuring database accountability, developed countries hosting most databases are pressing provider countries to recognize certificates, while their stakeholders seek to make certificates conclusive proof of lawful use and benefit-sharing. The COP17 draft decision risks advancing this agenda, indirectly, if not directly.
COP17 is supposed to consider additional modalities, including making public access to DSI accountable and transparent to all Parties; thresholds and contribution rates, using national and international standards, for small, medium and large entities; and benefit-sharing that accounts for products and services developed using DSI. However, the draft decision does not address these issues effectively. It leaves database accountability to database-managers’ discretion; proposes exempting entities classified nationally as small or medium-sized; and calls for work on alternative payment pathways based on DSI’s value rather than the total revenue-based calculations set out in decision 16/2. These proposals risk narrowing contributions while pressuring provider countries to waive ABS laws and communities’ rights over genetic resources, including DSI.
This imbalance extends to the Fund’s governance. Institutional documents such as the Memorandum of Understanding of the Cali Fund risks allowing monetary contributors to evaluate fund utilization, influence priorities and impose conditions, undermining recipient countries’ and communities’ autonomy. Although developing countries have called for review, pressure is mounting to approve the documents without amendment, with opponents arguing that changes could damage the Fund’s reputation.
Taken together, COP17 risks shifting the burden of making the multilateral mechanism work onto developing countries and communities, from whose resources DSI is extracted and used anonymously, and not on those who extract or facilitate extraction.
Developed countries’ failures – to provide sufficient financing for biodiversity in developing countries, prevent their databases from facilitating digital biopiracy, and to incentivize DSI users in their jurisdictions – create triple jeopardy for developing countries and communities: pressure to waive national ABS laws to mobilize Cali Fund financing; continued inequitable DSI extraction and use without permission or participation; and reduced autonomy over funds they are entitled to receive. Will COP17 correct these inequities or entrench them further?