Focus on biopiracy in Africa
Africa stands to lose huge benefits from its biodiversity for lack of legal
protection against biopiracy, concluded the Second South-South Biopiracy Summit
held last week in Johannesburg during the World Summit on Sustainable
Development (WSSD).
"Legislation is required and it is required yesterday," said
Nolwazi Gcaba, a South African patent and copyright attorney, referring to her
country's legislative vacuum on this matter.
Biodiversity - the fifth thematic area of WSSD - is Africa's richest asset.
The knowledge its people have developed over centuries on the properties of
plants, seeds, algae and other biological resources is now coveted by scientists
for medicinal, agricultural and other purposes.
Biopiracy is the theft of biological matter, like plants, seeds and genes. In
the absence of laws regulating access to these resources, pharmaceutical,
agrochemical and seed multinationals exploit Africa's biological wealth and
obtain rights of intellectual ownership to the resources and knowledge of
communities.
Multinationals make huge profits from African biodiversity but do not share
these with the communities who discovered, kept and transmitted the knowledge,
activists argue.
"They are stealing the loaf and sharing the crumbs," said Dr
Tewolde Berhan Egziabher, a leading expert on the topic at the Institute for
Sustainable Development in Ethiopia.
Thousands of patents on African plants have been filed. To name just a few:
brazzeine, a protein 500 times sweeter than sugar from a plant in Gabon; teff,
the grain used in Ethiopia's flat "injera" bread; thaumatin, a natural
sweetener from a plant in West Africa; the African soap berry and the Kunde Zulu
cowpea; genetic material from the west African cocoa plant.
Increasingly, developing countries are going to court over patents on their
indigenous plants. India overturned American patents for basmati rice and
wound-healing turmeric. Thailand is appealing a patent on jasmine rice.
The latest patent to make headlines involves the Hoodia cactus from the
Kalahari desert. For centuries, the San people of Southern Africa ate pieces of
the cactus to stave off hunger and thirst.
Analysing the cactus, the parastatal Council for Scientific and Industrial
Research (CSIR) in South Africa found the molecule that curbs appetite and sold
the rights to develop an anti-obesity drug to pharmaceutical company Pfizer. It
could be worth billions of US dollars.
The San complained. Its council threatened a lawsuit. Earlier this year the
CSIR agreed to share eventual royalties, and the Hoodia cactus became a landmark
case whereby indigenous communities stake a claim on their knowledge and profits
derived of it.
"Western medicine is protected. Wildlife is protected. But our knowledge
isn't, like it's worth nothing," said T.J. Matiba, a Venda traditional
healer, founder and president of South Africa's Council of Traditional Healers
since 1985.
Paradoxically, the poorest people in the world live in the world's
biodiversity hot spots. If they derive a benefit from their natural resources
and indigenous knowledge, they would be keen to protect them. That approach,
however, is in conflict with world trade rules.
The UN Convention on Biological Diversity, ratified by 183 countries and in
force since 1993, recognises the sovereignty of states and communities over
their genetic resources.
But the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement (TRIPS) of the
World Trade Organisation (WTO) does not. Since 1995, WTO requires its member
countries to comply with TRIPS.
This contradiction creates "schizophrenia between patent legislation and
protection of indigenous knowledge," said Rachel Wynberg, a South African
researcher on biodiversity now with the University of Strathclyde in the UK.
The root problem is that the existing system of intellectual property rights
and patents does not accommodate non-western systems of knowledge ownership and
access.
"It serves the interests of industrialised countries and fails
indigenous communities and holders of traditional knowledge," said Tom
Suchanandan, of South Africa's Human Sciences Research Council.
Under international law, an invention qualifies for patent protection only if
it is new and involves an inventive step. This excludes traditional products,
developed and handed down over generations. The system is rooted in the European
industrial and scientific tradition. It views knowledge as a commodity owned by
an individual or a company with the goal of trade.
Indigenous knowledge has a trans-generational, communal and cultural nature.
"There is no way in which the intellectual property system can protect
indigenous knowledge," said Gcaba. "We can't hijack it. We must create
a new system."
The first line of defence, said Tewolde, is for developing countries to
freeze biopatents, or patents on living things, from seeds to plants to genes.
At the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999, the African group took the lead in
opposing the patenting of life and protecting community rights over their
agricultural and biological heritage.
They are inspired by the African Model Law adopted by the former Organisation
of African Unity. It protects the rights of farmers, breeders and local
communities to their biological resources, traditional knowledge and
technologies. Their collective rights prevail over individual or corporate
monopoly interests. The patenting of life in any of its forms violates these
rights.
Last but not least, the state should ensure that at least half of benefits
derived from commercial use of biological resources are channeled back to the
local community.
African countries must now debate this model law and pass their own.
"After centuries of unjust and unfair extraction of our resources that
continues today, this is a step towards justice," said Tewolde.
[ENDS]
[This Item is Delivered to the "Africa-English" Service of the UN's
IRIN
humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views
of the United Nations. Copyright (c) UN Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs 2002]
|
