Community-based Mechanisms for Promoting Access and Benefit Sharing

In the last 2 decades, Nepal has piloted and promoted some of the good practices for community biodiversity management (CBM) approaches to promote access and exchange of seeds and planting materials as well as facilitate benefit sharing to ensure food and nutrition security of households in Nepal. The CBM approaches include diverse community-based participatory approaches ranging from community-based diversity fairs, food fairs, diversity field schools, diversity blocks and diversity kits to community seed bank (CSB), community biodiversity management (CBM) trust fund, participatory seed exchange, participatory plant breeding, participatory seed networks, value addition and marketing. However, due to the prevailing focus of centralized homogenized production systems and limited priority given in the local and diverse farmers seed systems, information and status of community-based mechanisms of access, exchange and sharing benefits arising from local genetic resources are limited. The objectives of this chapter were to: (1) highlight current initiatives and efforts of community-based approaches for promoting access, exchange and sharing benefits arising from the use of local genetic resources; (2) assess role of diverse community biodiversity management (CBM) tools to enhance access and promote benefit sharing among rural households, and (3) present community seed bank (CSB) as a potential legitimate local level institution for enhancing local level access and promote benefit-sharing.