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BIODIVERSITY: Activists Disagree on Economic Aspects of Benefit-Sharing

Mario Osava

CURITIBA, Brazil, Mar 28 2006 (IPS) - Access to genetic resources and the equitable distribution of the benefits derived from their use are the most controversial issues being discussed in Brazil by the 3,600 delegates from 173 countries attending the largest conference ever on biological diversity.

An international regime to regulate access and benefit-sharing (ABS) is doomed to failure because it is based on false premises and fails to take into account basic economic principles, argue some of the participants in the Mar. 20-31 Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP8), in the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba.

Others, meanwhile, reject it on the argument that it would involve the “privatisation” of goods and knowledge that are the common heritage of humanity.

With respect to the way the ABS regime is being negotiated, economist Joseph Vogel, from the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, said that “for years, I have predicted that it will not work out.”

He told IPS that he saw elements of “tragedy and comedy” in the negotiating process.

Both traditional knowledge, whose holders are demanding a share of the benefits derived, as well as genetic resources “are natural information,” and if that is not recognised, it will lead to failure, he said.

Physical control is impossible in the case of intangible goods, which involve questions of patents, copyright, commercial secrets and trademarks, he said.

And in the case of biodiversity and traditional knowledge, “a monopoly would not work, because they are dispersed throughout several countries,” or several communities or ethnic groups. If a country or community tries to negotiate access to biological resources with a view to making profits, “it would trigger a price war, because competition over information always drives down prices,” he said.

The biotech industry, forced to provide returns for its shareholders, would take advantage of that situation to push prices down to the lowest level, he added.

The solution, according to Vogel, would be to make traditional knowledge a commercial secret, because it involves the defence of intellectual property rights, and for countries and communities that share a certain kind of “information,” such as a plant with medicinal properties, to build “biodiversity cartels.”

That would be the only way to be able to negotiate on a reasonable footing with industry, he argued.

To illustrate, Vogel said that if a genetic resource being negotiated is native to the entire Amazon jungle region, all nine countries that share the rainforest should receive remuneration.

He suggested that 15 percent of the benefits generated from the genetic resource should go to the holders of the traditional knowledge and the communities where it is located, rather than the “measly 0.5 percent” proposed by some.

In first place, indigenous people “have to keep their mouths shut, and not talk to botanists or biologists,” because material gathered today for taxonomic studies could generate patents tomorrow, he warned.

As an example he mentioned a variety of peanut that a U.S. professor of botany purchased in a market in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul in 1952 and brought back to the United States.

Decades later, the value of the crop became clear as peanut breeders began to search for varieties that were resistant to the tomato spotted wilt virus, which has become a serious problem in the United States, and especially the southern part of the country, since the late 1980s.

The peanut from southern Brazil was used as the source of disease resistance in peanut varieties developed by universities in Georgia and Florida, which have been credited with rescuing peanut farmers in several southern U.S. states.

According to a report by the Washington-based Edmonds Institute, the disease-resistant varieties have contributed as much as two billion dollars to the U.S. economy since 1996.

Vogel added that the important contributions that economists would make to the debates on the Convention are missing, and argued that more specialists on the economy are needed in the discussions.

According to Karen Nansen, with Friends of the Earth Uruguay, the negotiations are following the current trend of privatisation of natural and biological resources, in accordance with a market logic, rather than environmental concerns or the rights of local communities and indigenous peoples.

Living organisms are already being patented, while seeds and water are increasingly falling under the control of transnational corporations, and even conservation of biodiversity is occurring more and more in privately-owned areas. And this “commodification of life” is being imposed in national laws through free trade treaties, she complained.

The ABS regime is in line with the traditional intellectual property view, said Nansen, who argued that for indigenous people and local communities, “it is not a solution, but spells privatisation.”

The activist sees a glimpse of hope, however, in the “creative resistance” mounted by environmental groups and networks like the international small farmers movement Vía Campesina, which argue that seeds “belong to the people, in benefit of humanity.”

Negotiating access to genetic resources is “just a waste of time, and will not produce any benefit for humanity,” said Costa Rican activist Silvia Rodríguez with the Barcelona-based GRAIN, an international non-governmental organisation that promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s control over genetic resources and local knowledge.

Rodríguez, an expert on international treaties, said it has not yet been determined how “the fair and equitable distribution of the benefits” arising from the use of genetic resources can be defined, and pointed out that even a more concrete aspect of access to biodiversity, technology transfer, has not been fulfilled and has virtually been forgotten by the participants in the COP8.

Costa Rica was a pioneer in obtaining remuneration for its rich biodiversity. In 1991, a year before the Convention was approved, the National Biodiversity Institute, a private body with links to the government, signed a contract with U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant Merck for one million dollars and the possibility of access to a share of the royalties if genetic material yielded by the country gave rise to a patent.

But according to Rodríguez, the agreement was “a fiasco, a deception of the local communities, which have yet to see any benefit.”

Representatives of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity do not agree that the negotiations on ABS should be opposed, and have demanded to be allowed to take part in the discussions on fair distribution of benefits.

Not negotiating would be to leave in place the current plundering of “biodiversity and the knowledge we possess” by transnational corporations, Florina López, a member of the Kuna indigenous community from Panama, told IPS.

López, who heads a network of women’s groups that is trying to get its concerns heard in the debates on the Convention, acknowledged, nevertheless, that it will take “many, many years” to reach agreement on an ABS regime, due to the complexity of the issue.