Plant breeders and seed industries have contributed to the prosperity of the world’s agricultural sector by identifying and deploying genetic resources through the processes of selective breeding. They have improved yield, disease resistance, and resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, including many traits influenced by climate change. Their work has played a huge role in rural development and food security.

The free movement and open sharing of plant genetic resources are essential for global food security but are governed by increasingly strict international treaties. Researchers involved in wheat breeding and pathogen analysis are burdened by the uncertain and non-systematic application of these standards.

The Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, founded by Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug in 2005 to protect wheat farmers from the scourge of new strains of stem rust disease emerging out of East Africa, is an excellent example of the importance of free germplasm exchange. Scientists exchange undefeated rust resistant genes from various wheat varieties, landraces and wild relatives; collaborate on cleaning up deleterious traits from wild relatives; exchange and test elite high-yielding breeding lines in several countries; and send isolates of country-specific disease organisms to biosafety testing labs around the world for race analysis.

What was previously a free and open exchange for genetic resources important to national wheat breeding and pathogen surveillance systems, has become mired in forms and legal documents associated with the multilateral Convention on Biological Diversity and its series of attendant treaties and conventions — particularly the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, the Nagoya Protocol, and the Access and Benefit-sharing Clearing House.

Increasingly, the burden is on the researchers to determine that the germplasm they are deploying has been acquired legally. Today, without the right “forms” all along the value chain, researchers at private and public research institutions as well as CEOs of national and international seed companies can be charged and arrested for violating any one of many protocols.

How can scientists engage with policymakers to craft regulations and country-specific controls that take research practices into account so that exchanges of seed, germplasm and disease organisms critical to wheat improvement are not stifled. Participation by wheat scientists in global forums like the Nagoya Protocol is critical to shaping more favorable environments for research and exchange.