Pharmaceutical and a host of other companies will be expected to voluntarily pay into a new fund covering their use of genetic data, the UN COP16 biodiversity summit agreed, but countries failed to reach a wider agreement on global finance for nature after talks ran overtime and were suspended.
1 per cent of revenue would have meant a $67mn payment last year from Switzerland’s Roche, the biggest non-US pharma company by sales, alone. Expert observers to the negotiations noted that the use of the word “should”, rather than “shall”, meant that these would essentially be voluntary contributions by companies, rather than the mandatory levy that some countries had been pushing for.
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