L.J. Writes

Awwright! If the most precipitous large-scale climate change in the past two million years will only turn me faster and deadlier, it really looks like nothing can stop me. Or that's how I choose to interpret it anyway.

My thesis is a pretty obscure area even for international law scholars, but it's basically about a fair price on nature: Genetic resources such as wild plants or microbes. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity most of the countries around the world agreed that genetic resource-rich countries (mostly though not all in the global South) should get a fair and equitable share when companies from biotechnology-rich countries (in the global North) cash out on the former's genetic resources. When a Swiss pharmaceutical company makes profits off Tamiflu whose active ingredient is fennel and whose process is based on traditional Chinese medicine, for instance. The problem is what this fair and equitable share is. Genetic resource users and providers are supposed to agree on this by contract, but countries are also obligated to make the benefit sharing fair and equitable. So the central question is, how to regulate these contracts to make sure they provide for fair and equitable benefit sharing? And the heart of that comes down to, what does "fair and equitable" mean in the first place in this context? That's what I'm trying to define and what my graduation hinges on.