International Deployment of Microbial Pest Control Agents: Falling Between the Cracks of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol?

摘要

This paper considers one tangled web of conflicting developments. It involves the popular desire to replace chemical pesticides with more “natural” biological control strategies, plus a slowly emerging awareness of a less benign side to microbial pest control agents, based on their potential invasiveness and sometimes striking similarities to agents of bioterrorism and biological warfare. This desire, however, is overshadowed by concerns about the environmental release of genetically engineered organisms. I argue that as some of the concerns about ecological diversity, as captured by the Convention on Biodiversity, were channeled into the subsequent Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Cartagena Protocol) with its emphasis entirely on products of biotechnology, microbial pest control agents have “fallen through the cracks” of international environmental law.