… [S]ince the 1990s, well-intentioned laws shifted the governance of biodiversity from a shared global resource to the sovereign control of nation states, with serious unintended consequences.
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Despite aiming to encourage both the sustainable use of biodiversity and its conservation, the Convention on Biological Diversity fails to achieve much of either. Rather than providing incentives for countries to enable access to biodiversity for the global good—including for research related to agricultural development and food security—the regime has restricted access by raising transaction costs. …
Under current arrangements, countries that harbor genetic resources have an incentive to extract as much rent as they can from their assets. By contrast, these same countries can claim just a small fraction of the global benefit …. The incentives created by the Convention thus undermine the global interest. Where biodiversity is threatened by development, conservation imposes real financial burdens and opportunity costs.
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Governance that prioritizes process over progress and control over collaboration—however well-intentioned—has obstructed advances in biodiversity conservation, research and development, and food security, while delivering little benefit to biodiversity or society. In doing so, it has harmed those it aimed to protect.
