As the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) was reached, CABI reviewed its benefit sharing activities. CABI published its Nagoya Protocol Access and Benefit Sharing Policy online (CABI 2018a) and took a position to share benefits whether the provider country is party to the Nagoya Protocol or not.

CABI is mission driven and dedicated to supporting its 50 member countries in agriculture and the environment, sharing knowledge and acting to translate science into practical tools for farmers to improve crop production and enhance their livelihoods. CABI member countries have agreed that CABI shares the benefits of its work with genetic resources through its mission-based objectives. CABI has introduced ABS Best Practices in its centres around the world and in most cases, works through in-country partners on funded projects, sharing project outputs. Since enactment of the Nagoya Protocol, CABI UK, Egham has initiated over 200 projects involving genetic resources. In 2019, 116 projects were assessed of which the majority were out of scope of UK regulation. For example nine projects were internally funded, designed to improve services and outputs to users, partners and provider countries. Twenty-four projects were funded by research programmes or organizations; these projects provided services such as identification of organisms, diagnosis of disease and assessment of contamination of seeds. Several of the projects utilized organisms from countries that have no access regulation, for example the UK, where 16 projects utilized UK genetic resources. The majority of the benefits shared were non-monetary and included: sharing of Research and Development (R&D) results; collaboration in education, training, research, development programmes; joint authorship of publications and joint ownership of intellectual property rights; access to ex-situ facilities and databases; transfer of scientific information, knowledge and technology; and institutional capacity-development helping build or maintain local collections. Monetary benefits were limited to sharing project funding for research in both the UK and provider countries. An added benefit is that fungi and bacteria from this work are preserved for future use in the CABI living collection and shared with users and project partners.