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Date :  2005-03-30
langue :  Anglais
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Biopiracy

Biopiracy

Source :  Suman Sahai


Biopiracy is understood as the unauthorized use of the genetic resources and the indigenous knowledge of communities by others who have neither taken permission from the communities nor entered into any kind of contract with them. Biopiracy is not a new phenomenon. The plunder of biological wealth from the biodiversity rich southern countries was a hallmark of colonial time. The British for instance, facilitated the theft of rubber out of Brazil, where it was closely guarded, so that they could cultivate it in their colonies in Asia, India included, and control the global rubber trade. So biopiracy has been around for a long time but its contours have changed. In the early days, plants and animals formed part of the booty of conquering armies or were acquired through stealth, as in the case of rubber. Today, the plunder of biological wealth is done rather more blatantly, using technical and legal instruments legitimised on international platforms.

The renewed thrust to biopiracy today comes from the developments in biotechnology and the international pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry is facing a crisis of sorts. The cost of drug development has become astronomical. The figures put out by the drug industry say that it costs them about one billion US dollars to put a new product on the market. Together with that is the growing incidence of side effects, often of a dangerous kind, as seen in the recent case of Vioxx, a drug produced by Merck prescribed for relieving acute pain in adults which triggered heart problems in users. The search for new molecules is therefore expensive, uncertain and runs the risk of huge payments in liability when things go wrong.

Hence the pharmaceutical industry is looking increasingly at medicines and products that have been developed by local communities in older cultures like India, Africa and China where the centuries old traditions of indigenous healing are still viable and in use. These healing practices and cures are rich hunting grounds for biopirates. The patent is the instrument of pirating the product from its legitimate owners. Therefore we have had the famous cases of biopiracy involving the Hoodia plant of the San tribe, the turmeric from India and the Ayahuasca from the Amazon basin. Fortunately all these patents have been successfully challenged but there is enough evidence that this has not halted the process of biopiracy which continues unabated. In fact, we make a fuss only about what we discover. Most of the time we do not know what has already been patented.

In the case of biotechnology, we have a technology which uses genetic resources to make products that were earlier made by chemical processes. Drugs like insulin and products for bioremediation and cleaning up the environment are some of the potential products offered by biotechnology. The dilemma with biotechnology and its application is the fact that the technology of cutting and pasting genes from one organism into the other (recombinant DNA technology) has been developed in the laboratories of the industrialized nations, chiefly the USA but the raw material, the genes, are available in the genetic resources of the tropical countries of the South. So we have a situation where the countries that have the technology, do not have the raw materials. The answer that the western companies have found to this problem is biopiracy. Rather than follow a just and equitable path and enter into an agreement with the owners of the genetic resources to use their materials and agree to share the profits made from the commercialisation of the products, they choose simply to steal their materials and patent them in their home countries. The USPTO (The US Patent and Trademarks Office) is the single largest offender in granting illegitimate patents of this kind, followed by the European Patent Office, Japan is in third place.

Biopiracy today is facilitated by international organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the TRIPS chapter of which allows anybody to patent anything, regardless of whether the subject of the patent claim has been acquired legitimately or otherwise. The other international convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which deals with biological resources, is a pro - community convention which recognizes that local communities are the owners of the biological resources and the indigenous knowledge developed by them. It also requires that when biological resources and indigenous knowledge are to be used, this can only happen with the prior consent of the communities and after making an agreement to share the profits of commercialisation with them. Needless to say, the greatest biopirate, the USA, has refused to become a member of the CBD and does not acknowledge that local communities have any rights!

The battle against biopiracy cannot be won with struggling to challenge every patent that is granted. That is an expensive and in the end, ineffective exercise. The only response to rampant biopiracy is to negotiate aggressively at the international level for a formal linkage between the WTO and the CBD so that patents under TRIPS cannot be granted unless the conditions of the CBD are complied with by the party seeking the patent on any biological material. The Doha Declaration includes this provision but predictably, the US is not allowing any movement on it. India is promoting this line in the WTO along with countries like Brazil, China, Ecuador, Malaysia and others. This position must be held and strengthened at every WTO meeting.


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