Armenia, Nagoya and the Long History of Who Owns Nature

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Armenia ratified the Nagoya Protocol this spring, and later this year it will host the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP17). Together, these developments place the country in an unusual position: newly bound by an international instrument governing access to countries’ genetic resources and the sharing of benefits arising from their use, while simultaneously hosting negotiations over its future. 

At its heart is a deceptively simple question: who owns nature, and who should benefit when it becomes valuable?

To understand why that question matters, we need to go back much further than 2010.

The movement of plants across the world is one of the oldest instruments of imperial power, and for most of its history, it operated without anything resembling law.

Consider quinine. 

For two centuries, the bark of the cinchona tree, native to the eastern slopes of the Andes, was the only effective treatment for malaria, and the states of South America controlled the trade. In the middle of the 19th century, British and Dutch expeditions took cinchona seeds and seedlings out of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, in several cases in defiance of local export prohibitions, and established plantations in India and Java. Within a few decades, the Andean monopoly was gone, and the Dutch colonial plantations on Java supplied the overwhelming majority of the world’s quinine. The drug that made European occupation of tropical Africa and Asia medically survivable was built on genetic material taken from countries that received nothing for it.

Or consider rubber. 

In 1876, Henry Wickham removed tens of thousands of Hevea brasiliensis seeds from the Amazon basin and delivered them to Kew Gardens in London, from where the surviving seedlings were sent to Ceylon and Malaya. Within 30 years, the Brazilian rubber economy had collapsed, and Southeast Asian plantations dominated global supply. The city of Manaus, which had built an opera house on rubber money, went quiet.

The botanical gardens of the imperial capitals functioned as processing centers in a global system for the acquisition, acclimatization and redistribution of biological wealth. Coffee, tea, indigo, cotton, sugar, cacao, oil palm: the agricultural map of the modern world is substantially the product of germplasm moved from the places that held it to the places that could profit from it. The legal position throughout was straightforward. Biological material was res nullius, a thing belonging to nobody, free to whoever collected it. Sovereignty over territory did not extend to sovereignty over the genetic contents of that territory.

That default survived into the era of pharmaceutical bioprospecting, when a compound isolated from a plant known to a community in Madagascar or Cameroon could become the basis of a patented drug generating hundreds of millions in revenue, none of it flowing back. The term coined for this in the 1990s was biopiracy, and while the word is polemical, the pattern it described was real and documented across dozens of cases.

The Convention on Biological Diversity, opened for signature at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, was the moment this default was formally reversed. Its most consequential provision established States’ sovereign rights over their own biological resources, converting genetic material from a global commons available to whoever reached it first into something over which a state could exercise legal authority. The Convention set out three objectives: conservation, sustainable use, and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources. The third was where the history lived, and it took another 18 years to build the machinery to give it effect. That machinery is the Nagoya Protocol, adopted at COP10,  held in Nagoya, Japan, in October 2010, and in force since 2014.

The Machinery, Briefly

Genetic resources, in the language of the Convention, are the genetic material of plants, animals, microorganisms, and other biological matter that has actual or potential value. Genetic material refers to the DNA and the sequences encoded within it that carry the instructions for the traits and properties of living organisms. The value of a genetic resource typically lies in a specific sequence or combination of sequences: a gene coding for resistance to a particular disease, a sequence producing a compound with pharmaceutical activity, a genetic variant conferring drought tolerance in a wild relative of a domesticated crop.

The Protocol establishes a framework known as access and benefit-sharing (ABS), and it works on two principles. The first is prior informed consent (PIC): anyone seeking to access genetic resources within a state’s jurisdiction must obtain that state’s permission before doing so. The second is mutually agreed terms (MAT): the conditions of access, including the sharing of benefits arising from any subsequent use, must be negotiated with the country of origin. Where indigenous or local communities hold traditional knowledge about the properties of the material, their consent is required too, and benefits must reach them.

Geography Matters

None of this means the same thing everywhere, and pretending otherwise produces bad policy. For a megadiverse state, Nagoya carries tangible economic stakes. Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, India, Kenya, and a handful of others hold a disproportionate share of the planet’s biological variety. For them, the ABS regime is a legal shield over a national endowment of enormous potential value. These states negotiated hard for the Protocol and have built substantial domestic architecture around it. For instance, Brazil’s system is elaborate, and its administration of access permits has become a serious regulatory function of the state.

For the advanced user States, the calculation inverts. Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the European Union collectively host much of the world’s pharmaceutical, agricultural biotech, and cosmetics research. For them, the Protocol is a compliance burden imposed on their industries and universities. The EU’s regulation on user compliance is the most developed in the world, but the engagement is largely defensive. The United States never ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity at all, and sits outside the entire structure, which tells you something about how the interests distribute.

And then there is the large middle, where Armenia sits.

Armenia is not megadiverse in the technical sense. It is also, however, biologically remarkable for its size: a country of under 30,000 square kilometres containing a substantial proportion of the flora of the entire Caucasus, with high endemism driven by extreme variation in altitude and climate across very short distances. It is one of the principal centers of origin for wild relatives of domesticated wheat, barley, and fruit crops, which is not a minor detail. As agricultural systems come under climate stress, the genetic diversity held in wild crop relatives becomes strategically valuable in a way that is difficult to overstate. Armenia is also not a major user State. Its pharmaceutical and biotech sectors are modest, and its scientific institutions are capable but under-resourced.

So what is Nagoya for in a country like Armenia?

Its value is real but conditional, and it is easy to misidentify. The countries that expected the Protocol to generate significant income streams have mostly been disappointed; benefit-sharing revenues globally have been modest and slow. The value lies elsewhere. Armenia now has legal standing to know what leaves the country, to set conditions on it, and to insist on scientific participation in work conducted on its own biological material. That is a smaller claim than the rhetoric around ABS often suggests. It is also worth having.

Suppose a research team abroad becomes interested in an Armenian plant that local communities have long used medicinally and suspects it holds a compound with therapeutic value. Under Nagoya, the team cannot simply come and collect. It must approach Armenia’s designated authority, say what it intends to do (take samples, sequence genes, develop a product), and negotiate before anything moves. Armenia sets the terms. Those terms might restrict what the material can be used for, require joint work with Armenian institutions, mandate data sharing, and specify what the country receives if something valuable emerges: royalties and milestone payments, or training, equipment, technology transfer, and funding for conservation. No agreement, no access.

The permit that results is logged on the Access and Benefit-Sharing Clearing-House, a public platform run by the Convention’s Secretariat, and becomes an internationally recognized certificate of compliance (IRCC). The certificate travels with the material. A company holding Armenian genetic material under a valid permit can prove it; one that cannot, cannot. User States are obliged to run checkpoints and due diligence that trace what sits in their jurisdiction back to a valid certificate. What Armenia authorizes at home, other states are required to verify abroad.

Nothing of this kind existed before.

The conditional part is that none of this is self-executing. A ratified protocol without a designated authority, implementing legislation, a functioning permit procedure, and the administrative capacity to evaluate applications is, operationally, a document. There are States party to Nagoya that have had it in force for years and remain unable to process an access request. Ratification places a country in the system; it does not place the system in the country.

The International Law Standard

It is worth saying something about the character of the ambition here, because the Protocol is frequently criticized on grounds that misunderstand what instruments of this kind are designed to achieve. Nagoya will not stop every unrecorded sample from leaving Armenia in a researcher’s pocket. It will not deliver a windfall. It will not undo the historical asymmetry it was built in response to, and the states that carried that history hardest have not been made whole by it. Judged against the standard of solving the problem, it fails.

That standard is the wrong one, and not only for this instrument. International environmental law does not restore what has been lost; it manages the rate and terms of ongoing loss. Across nearly every branch of international law, the ambition is the same, and it is modest: to take a domain operating on power and default, and bring it inside a structure where conduct becomes visible, contestable, and subject to a rule that someone can be asked to answer to.

That is what the ABS regime does. Before 1992, the removal of biological material from a country was, legally, nothing, an act without a category. After Nagoya, it is an act that either has a certificate or does not; the uncontrolled has been made legible. Whether it is then controlled depends on states, and states are uneven, and enforcement is patchy, and the powerful comply selectively. All true. The alternative is not a better regime. The alternative is the world of 1876, in which a man walks out of the Amazon with 70,000 seeds and no one has committed any offense at all.

For Armenia, this is the frame that makes ratification intelligible. Not as a promise of income, but as the acquisition of standing in a domain where the country previously had none.

Hosting the Room

Which brings us to COP17, and the fact of Yerevan as its venue. Hosting a Conference of the Parties confer a specific and temporary kind of influence. The host presides, shapes the informal architecture of the negotiation, and inherits the diplomatic association with whatever the conference produces. The conferences are named after their venues in the institutional memory of the regime. This is why an instrument negotiated in Japan is called the Nagoya Protocol, and why the current global targets carry the names Kunming and Montreal. Whatever COP17 concludes, will carry Yerevan’s name.

The central item on the table in Yerevan is digital sequence information (DSI): the fact that a genetic sequence can now be read, digitized, uploaded, and used anywhere in the world without the physical sample ever crossing a border. This is an existential problem for a Protocol built entirely around the movement of material things. The parties have been constructing a multilateral fund to capture benefits from DSI use, with the outlines agreed under the Kunming- Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and at COP16 in Cali. COP17 will be where its operationalization is fought over. For provider states, the DSI question will determine whether the benefit-sharing pillar of the Convention means anything at all in the coming decades, because the bilateral permit model on which the Protocol is built is being quietly bypassed by the technology.

There is a version of hosting that is ceremonial: a well-run conference, good photographs, a communiqué. There is another version in which the host arrives having done the domestic work, with a functioning national system, a clear position on the DSI negotiation, and something to say about what the instrument looks like from the position of a small state with significant biodiversity and limited capacity.

The domestic work has a specific content. Article 13 of the Protocol obliges Armenia to name a national focal point and to designate a competent national authority with the power to grant access, so that a researcher seeking Armenian genetic material knows who can say yes and on what terms. Article 6 obliges a legal framework through which prior informed consent is sought and mutually agreed terms are negotiated, since consent without a procedure is a courtesy rather than a requirement. Article 6(3)(e) obliges the issuance of a permit at the time of access, notified to the ABS Clearing-House, which under Article 17(2) becomes an internationally recognized certificate of compliance: the instrument by which a private arrangement becomes a traceable one. And Articles 15 and 17 oblige the compliance measures and the checkpoints that monitor utilization downstream, without which the rest is paperwork that travels well and binds nobody. These are institutions, and institutions take time to staff and stand up.

Armenia ratified the Protocol in the spring. The conference takes place later this year. The distance between those two events  is where the answer lies. There is something fitting in a small country hosting this debate. The states that wrote the rules of the old system were never the ones that lived under them. Yerevan will not settle the question of who owns nature. But for a few days, it will be the room where a country rich in biological resources but with limited leverage gets to speak first and be heard. That is not nothing. In this discipline, it is often most of what there is.

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