Marking the International Day of Biodiversity on 22 March 2008, civil society organizations and social movements have launched an international Call to action on the World Food Emergency and the underlying loss of biodiversity.

Indigenous peoples have been sustainably using their land, territories and resources for ages. During the past few centuries, they have been protecting biological resources against the onslaught of industrial exploitation. This is the statement from the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity.

A last minute attempt by six biotech giants to undermine international negotiations on biotech crops was condemned by environmental groups as a proposal to ‘privatise international law’.

Via Campesina's position paper on the Protocol on Biosecurity and the Convention on Biodiversity calling on signatory governments to recognize the ancient role of peasant/community based farmers and warning them against the false solutions.

Many organizations around the world will give a clear message against the expansion of monoculture tree plantations, agrofuels and GE trees through a letter to be distributed during the Conference of the Parties in Bonn, Germany on 19-30 May of 2008.

Negotiations under the UN Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to establish an international regime for liability and redress for damage caused by genetically modified organisms (GMOs) failed to conclude as mandated. The fifth meeting of the Working Group on the liability regime was held in Cartagena on 12-19 March, in the city in Colombia that gave its name to the Biosafety Protocol.

Agricultural biodiversity was a key item on the agenda of the just concluded meeting in Rome of the scientific and technical advisory body (SBSTTA) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and yet this meeting too sidestepped the critical issue of reforming the agricultural land tenure as a means to enhance agrobiodiversity

The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) this year once again highlighted that land grown with genetically modified (GM) crops have increased and claimed that these crops are the answer to reducing world hunger and poverty.

The Ninth Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 9) will take place in Bonn, Germany, in May. During the conference, there will be meetings focused on GM trees and agrofuels and civil society organizations are warning of strategies to 'privatize biodiversity'.

Nestled inside a mountain, the "Global Seed Vault" is basically a giant icebox able to hold 4.5 million seed samples in cold storage for humanity's future needs located on an island in Svalbard, Norway. However, this "ultimate safety net" for the biodiversity that world farming depends on is sadly just the latest move in a wider strategy to make ex situ (off site) storage in seed banks the only approach to crop diversity conservation.