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Behind us is infinite power.
Before us is endless possibility.
Around us is boundless opportunity.
Why should we fear?

Unfortunately that is not the closing statement of the Meeting of the Aarhus Convention. It's an advertisement poster of Chisinau Airport, showing seven children in the departure lounge, ready to travel the world - Except that they probably aren't.

Looking around the departure lounge I can only wonder how many of the actual children here, how many of the adults have infinite power, endless possibility, boundless opportunity. I had misread it first, reading "borderless opportunity" which would have been enough irony in itself when you think about the number of hoops to jump through to get a visa into a Schengen country from here.
There are other NGO representatives here, travelling back to countries like Ukraine or Belarus, countries that are not in compliance with the Aarhus Convention. Infinite power to whom?
Yesterday...

Today "Business and Industry" entered the stage. Again compared to the CBD negotiations I'm used to there is little industry present: so far there are only four them, which makes their background even more remarkable.
Out of the four: three directly represent the biotech industry: EuropaBio (represented by a fromer Monsanto employee), CropLife and European Crop Protection Association (biotech looby organisations in the EU). The fourth one comes from the International Chamber of Commerce, an organisation that repeatedly works to make sure that biotech companies are not hindered by national or international legislations.
What are they doing here? Some countries, esp. some of the EU states have regional and national regulation that forces companies to be open about field trials with...

Last week I attended this year's meeting of the Informal Advisory Committee of the Biosafety Clearing House (BCH).
The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety regulates the international trade with living GMOs, and one of it's key components is its clearing house. The BCH collects all the data countries have about GMOs from data about the individual GMOs, its transgenic constructs and risk assessments to national laws and decisions taken about import and cultivation. Given such diverse information, and the need to cross-reference a lot between records, the site still manages to look quite calm and accessible.
But what really made my day was the advanced search. Users can add additional type of records using "and...

It was clear from the beginning of the biennial United Nations biodiversity conference in Nagoya that money was - and is - a crucial issue. Unfortunately, the conference confirmed a consistent pattern of failure to make sufficient provision for developing countries to enable them to implement their commitments under the CBD.

THE Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 report presented at the opening of the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP 10) admitted that none of the targets with regard to finance that the international community (with the exception of the USA that is not a Party to the CBD) had set itself was achieved.

In 2002, the CBD Parties had formulated Target 11.1: 'New and additional financial resources are transferred to developing countries to allow...