The second meeting of the Ad Hoc Open-ended Working Group on Access and Benefit-sharing (ABS) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) met from 1-5 December 2003 in Montreal, Canada.

Approximately 280 participants attended the meeting, representing 91 governments, as well as UN agencies, inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), indigenous and local community groups, academia and industry.
Delegates adopted six recommendations on: reports on experience with the Bonn Guidelines; the international regime on ABS; use of terms; other approaches, as set out in decision VI/24 B on other approaches for implementing the CBD ABS provisions; measures to ensure compliance with prior informed consent (PIC) and mutually agreed terms (MAT); and capacity building. The Working Group’s recommendations will be forwarded to CBD COP-7, which will be held from 9-20 February 2004, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The meeting was charged with the significant task of paving the way for COP-7 negotiations on steps to develop an international ABS regime. Although much time and effort was devoted to debating the regime’s process, nature, scope, elements and modalities, delegates admitted that a heavily bracketed text was the best that could be achieved at such an early stage. While discussions on an international regime overshadowed the other topics, delegates expressed satisfaction with the recommendation on compliance measures for PIC and MAT, which, although not clarifying the relationship with, and the role of, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and leaving open the debate on an international certificate of origin or legal provenance, provides for steps to move forward. The recommendation on capacity building and the expert workshop’s draft action plan was also welcomed as concrete outcomes for the implementation of CBD ABS-related provisions. The Earth Negotiations Bulletin’s coverage of this meeting is available at: http://enb.iisd.org/biodiv/abs-wg2/