WHAT’S ON THE TABLE

PABS Letter to Presidency_11 March

Honourable President Ramaphosa,

We write out of deep concern about the final round of negotiations for the Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) system taking place 23-28 March 2026 at the World Health Organisation. The PABS system will be formalised as an annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement (PA), adopted last year. Presently, the PA offers few guarantees that pandemic preparedness and response efforts will not, once again, leave Global South countries last in line to purchase of manufacture pandemic related health products. Perhaps the PABS Annex is the only way to address this gap in the PA, negotiated and adopted under South African leadership.

However, Global South delegations are being pressured to conclude the process and agree to a largely symbolic PABS Annex that will leave the details of benefit sharing to be worked out later, while assuming obligations to share pathogens and sequence information with unaccountable and non-transparent entities. This would weaken the PA, compromise the sovereign rights of developing countries over their biological resources, including genetic data, and potentially expose them to biosecurity risks.

We therefore urge the Governments of African States to ensure the following demands in PABS Annex

● Access to all PABS Sequence Information is made only through databases that have contractual relationships with WHO or through a database maintained by WHO and have mandatory features like user registration, account verification and data access agreements.

● All recipients of the PABS materials and/or Sequence Information are bound by contracts that obligate them with respect to terms of use, including benefit sharing, regardless of whether they use PABS resources for commercial purposes or non-commercial purposes. Contracts should be concluded up front – i.e. when accessing PABS materials and not at the point where medical products are developed or commercialised – and should specify the monetary and/or non-monetary benefits users will share. Such benefits may be specifically standardised for categories of different types of users.

● The PABS system has proper tracking and tracing measures for both biological materials and sequencing information and explicit rules governing onward sharing of pathogens as well as sequence information.

● In relation to non-monetary benefits:

o Ensure affordable supplies of vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics for vulnerable people and countries through WHO not only once the pandemic is declared, but as soon as an international coordinated public health response to health emergencies begins, with an aim to prevent outbreaks becoming a pandemic.

o Avoiding vague language around “capacity building” and insisting on meaningful benefits such as allowing WHO to issue non-exclusive licenses to developing country manufacturers or to WHO-supported initiatives for regionally diversified manufacturing as well as other such benefits that will enable technology transfer and address the inequities between developed and developing country researchers in the current research and development ecosystems.

● Public access to and scrutiny of information on recipients of PABS materials and data, agreements signed with manufacturers and other participants, and regulatory approval information.

Without these minimum elements of accountability and transparency, Article 12 of the PA will not only be weakened, but also it will turn the PABS system into a facilitator of biopiracy. There is a concerted push by the EU and Norway to legitimise anonymous access to pathogen sequence information, and to eliminate all possibilities of traceability, despite their commitment under Article 12 and the Africa Group’s demands for mandatory user registration and data access agreements for users of PABS Sequence Information. They also, although not that strongly, extend the same demand on biological specimens of pathogens as well. These arguments ignore the long history of biopiracy and data extractivism that has characterised Africa’s engagement with “global science” – a problem researchers and institutions on the continent have been trying to address.

For example, African Academy of Sciences, AESA and AUDA-NEPAD’s 2021 Recommendations for Data and Biospecimen Governance in Africa1 recommends developing technologies that “ensure that sample and data consents, use and re-use can be traced back to origin and validated, as well as followed forward to ensure appropriate, consented re-use as well as equitable benefit sharing from future use”. It endorses the use of contracts that enable “the original data provider or their community to share in benefits resulting from innovation,” and recommends negotiating “data and benefit sharing terms based on African needs and policies.” African scientists have also developed the PHA4GE Microbial Data-Sharing Accord2 which aims to correct the neocolonial and extractivist modes of downstream data processing and R&D that result in few benefits for Global South populations and researchers. It sets out a baseline consensus for governing microbial data-sharing, including pathogen data, by specifying norms for onward sharing of data and recognising the contributions and rights of country-of-origin data generators.

The EU frames the Africa Group’s demands as lacking pragmatism, while disregarding several of its own Regulations and unanimously adopted international instruments like the UNESCO recommendation on Open Science 2021. The truth is that these demands are central to honouring Article 12 of the PA, as well as the international law of access and benefit sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity and Nagoya Protocol. Anonymous sharing also threatens biosecurity: the PABS annex is dealing with highly valuable biological materials and data that are dual use resources. If not governed properly, African States would be undermining their biosecurity safeguards and defence against man-made biological threats.

The PABS Annex is a multilateral instrument, and it must not be reduced to the lowest common denominator. This concern is particularly urgent considering ongoing bilateral negotiations reportedly pressuring African countries to compromise their data sovereignty in exchange for short-term financing for HIV and AIDS programmes. Even such limited opportunities to benefit will disappear if the PABS Annex legitimises sharing pathogen data with unaccountable databases that allow anonymous access. By contrast, a PABS system with proper governance of biospecimens and data, and clear benchmark benefits, would strengthen the bargaining power of African States in negotiations with non-parties to the PA seeking access to such resources outside the PABS framework.

We urge African governments not to dilute multilateral ABS rules merely to conclude the PABS Annex negotiations by May 2026. Instead, continue negotiations if the other side does not accept their demands by May 2026. Meanwhile, we urge governments to strengthen national and regional systems governing pathogen and sequence data sharing, ensuring only users who accept legally binding terms of use and benefit-sharing obligations receive access to specimens and data. This will improve the bargaining capacity of African States in the WHO and in bilateral negotiations. Our countries have sovereign rights over these resources, and we should convert these resources into strategic assets, rather than surrendering such rights to unaccountable labs, databases and anonymous users in the pretext of international comity and multilateralism. Preserving multilateralism should not be only the burden of African States.

Respectfully,

Links.

1- https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.nepad.org/file-
download/download/public/140027&ved=2ahUKEwjyiPud6I-TAxV7WEEAHZmBPI0QFnoECBkQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2rBwqs59qddk7LRc1f7szF

2- https://gh.bmj.com/content/9/10/e016474#xref-ref-14-1