Attended by some 60 government officials from the 19 ARIPO Member States, the African Seed Trade Association, foreign entities such as the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), the European Union’s Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO) and the French Association for Seed and Seedlings (GNIS), the meeting, for the first time, included three members of the African civil society - the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) and Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM- Zimbabwe).
These three African civil society representatives observed that ‘the four day discussions on the draft regulations were marred by impartiality towards contributions by civil society on the part of the designated chairperson of the meeting and lacked consensus on several contentious new substantive provisions in the draft regulations that lacked consistence with the Arusha Plant Variety Protection (PVP) Protocol’.
For more information see http://afsafrica.org/quarterly-update-newsletter-april-june/ (link is external) or 
AFSA Quarterly Newsletter April-June 2016