Where some biodiversity impact cannot be avoided offsets can be considered. Here too local and expert NGO partnerships can be invaluable. A third business sector derives benefits directly from biodiversity, and the most obvious example is the pharmaceutical development of herbs and plants for therapeutic commercial products. Here the issue of shared benefit, addressed in the Convention, is particularly important. In Turkey Glaxo Wellcome is funding a plant identification programme, to create a diversity data base and map specially important ecological sites, in collaboration with Fauna and Flora International, a local environmental BNGO and the University of Istanbul.
Indigenous knowledge can often be helpful in improving agricultural yields without intensification.
These categories of industry may be identifiable as having a special interest in biodiversity issues, but ultimately of course all economic activity and development has potential effects, on air and water, on the use of land, and on special habitats of one sort and another - and it is to the less directly committed companies, that the messages of biodiversity protection most need to be addressed. The point of this Conference, which I believe is very timely and on which the organisers are to be congratulated, is, if you will, to operationalise important principles of the interaction between development and biodiversity and put them into action. I believe there is a unique opportunity to establish real working partnerships between businesses and NGOs, working with both local and central government, whenever possible in the context of National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that the worst enemy of the environment is poverty, and the desperate short-termism which accompanies it. Slash and burn agriculture is scything away thousands of acres of ecological value as we speak.