Countries are expected to designate one or more competent national authorities to provide PIC in a transparent and cost-effective manner, and to establish clear rules and procedures for negotiating MAT. This means that the state will play a central role in the ABS process and that the competent national authority is likely to be a ministry or a state-funded

agency. Depending on the importance of forests and the forestry sector in a given country, the state authority responsible may be the ministry for the environment, for agriculture, for forestry, or for natural resources. In some countries, the responsibility for forests and forestry is shared between ministries; the ministry of the environment may be charged with the Dinaciclib nmr conservation of forest biodiversity, and the ministry of agriculture with forestry production, including the management of

forest genetic resources. This makes it possible that competing interests among different ministries and their agencies further delay the establishment of a functional ABS system. Furthermore, as some countries are likely to favour a very centralized approach and designate only a single national authority for all ABS arrangements regardless of sector, this increases the risk that ABS issues related to forest genetic resources are tasked to an agency with limited competence in forestry. On the other hand, such centralization can bring benefits, such as in increasing awareness of the necessary steps to obtain PIC and in bringing clarity to legal processes (Louafi and Schloen, 2013). Once a functional find more ABS system has been established at the national level, the Nagoya Protocol is likely to bring further changes Tyrosine-protein kinase BLK to previous exchange practices in the forestry sector that have often been rather informal. The ABS system will add a new layer of administration and increase the transaction costs and time needed to obtain forest genetic resources for R&D purposes. Both providers and users of forest genetic resources will need to take this into account in future R&D projects, and start to build their legal and technical capacity. A hypothetical example

of establishing a new range-wide provenance trial for a tree species illustrates the future challenges in compliance. A typical multi-locational provenance trial may involve obtaining seed from, say, 10 countries and establishing the trial in each of the same nations. Each country should then provide 9 PICs as a provider, and agree 9 MATs as a provider and another 9 as a user. It may take several months, if not years, for the project coordinator of such a trial to arrange the necessary documentation. Louafi and Schloen (2013) pointed out that transaction costs should not exceed the expected monetary and non-monetary benefits for a user of genetic resources, and that the expected benefits for a provider should be higher that the costs of running an ABS regulatory system.