The Origin, Development And Structure Of Demand For Plant Genetic Resources. The Impact Of The In Trust Agreements To The CGIAR Collections Availability

The objective of this paper is to explore how the demand of germplasm held by CGIAR genebanks changed over time in order to assess the possible influence of the 1994 In Trust Agreements on germplasm demand. The proposed theoretic model motivates the realistic hypothesis that the consequences of the In-Trust Agreementslead to an enhancement of CGIAR germplasm utilization. Therefore the paper firstlyexamines the classical literature on biodiversity’s valuation and its recentdevelopments and subsequently it investigates the origin of the agriculturalbiodiversity’s economic value, providing a basic conceptual framework to infer onfactors determining the demand for germplasm. Two Bayesian estimation frameworksare applied to the IRRI accessions distribution’s time-series to provide formal evidence to the hypothesis, exploiting Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, Gibbs sampling in particular. Evidence suggests that the demand variation implies a change in the genetic collections economic value, impacting therefore on their direct use search value.