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long live biodiversity!

ricardo navarro, foei chair

Friends of the Earth has a long and rich history of campaigning to protect threatened biodiversity. We know that biodiversity is crucial for meeting the food, health, socio-cultural and environmental security needs of communities around the world. Our strategy thus moves beyond a reactive one of protecting wild species and their natural habitats from the impacts of development to one that seeks to meet peoples' needs and preserve cultural livelihoods and traditional knowledge.

FoE Sri Lanka, for example, works with women and children in constructing seed nurseries to sustain biodiversity and create jobs. FoE Benin runs a botanical garden for endangered medicinal plants and simultaneously promotes the practice of traditional pharmacology. FoE Costa Rica enhances poor women's earning power and preserves local biodiversity with their butterfly-rearing project. And FoE groups from every part of the world are passionately resisting the introduction of biodiversity-killing GMOs and promoting sustainable agriculture.

FoEI also follows the many policy debates around trade, biotechnology and forest management which are directly related to biodiversity. At the April 2002 meeting of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), we will challenge policy makers to agree upon international commitments that place social and environmental concerns over economic ones. We will alert them about the dangerous implications of the recent Doha WTO negotiations for biodiversity. We will insist that the Biosafety Protocol secures biosafety, assists in the development of global sustainable agriculture, and ensures food security for all. We will promote community forest management, and campaign for the adoption of an action-oriented expanded work programme on forests within the CBD.

Friends of the Earth will continue to campaign for planetary biodiversity, as a threat to any species is also a threat to us as human beings.