The Second African Indigenous and Local Communities (ILC) Preparatory Meeting on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) and Traditional Knowledge begins today in Cape Town, South Africa. The 3-day Pan-African meeting, which is supported by the ABS Capacity Development Initiative for Africa and hosted by Natural Justice, will be attended by over 40 ILC representatives and representative organizations. The aims of the meeting are to facilitate the exchange of experiences on bio-prospecting and bio-piracy, to brief participants on the status of negotiations on the Convention on Biological Diversity International Regime on Access and Benefit Sharing (IRABS) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), with a focus on traditional knowledge (TK), to discuss the relevant draft decisions for the 10th Conference of the Parties of the CBD, and to develop an African ILC perspective on these draft decisions. Natural Justice will provide daily blog updates on the outcomes of the meeting.
