Marginalised San win royalties from diet drug
IRIN
It was a simple ceremony in a remote corner of the Kalahari desert, but a
landmark event for the rights of indigenous people worldwide.
Some singing and dancing by children, four brief speeches, and an intense
sense of pride as San elders watched their leaders sign an agreement between the
South African San Council and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
(CSIR) of South Africa.
In an historic moment, they agreed to share the profits from developing an
anti-obesity drug from a cactus the San have used for centuries to stave off
hunger and thirst.
The CSIR will pay the San eight percent of milestone payments made by its
licensee, Phytopharm, during the drug's clinical development over the next three
to four years. The San could earn six percent of all royalties if and when the
drug is marketed, possibly in 2008.
Already R259,066 (US $32,000) has been paid. Milestone payments for the San
could reach between R8 to R12 million (US $1 million to US $ 1.4 million) while
royalties could top R60 million (US $7.4 million) annually during the 15 to 20
years before a patent expires.
It took three years of "tough negotiations", in the words of San
Council chairman Petrus Vaalbooi, to reach a deal.
"Today we celebrate that the government and the country's highest
scientific authority have taken on the bushmen as equal partners," said a
beaming Vaalbooi, a small wiry man wearing a chief's traditional loincloth and
an animal fur draped over his bare chest.
The San, whose 40,000-year history makes them the oldest people in southern
Africa, chewed on the bitter Hoodia cactus to suppress hunger and thirst during
their hunting trips in the dusty Kalahari.
The CSIR has been researching indigenous plants since the 1960s and in 1996,
when its scientists isolated P57, the appetite-suppressant molecule in the
Hoodia, the CSIR patented it.
The San were ignored as the concept of indigenous knowledge and associated
rights was fairly new generally, and even newer to the CSIR, an apartheid-era
institution still unreconstructed at the time.
In 1997, the CSIR licensed the UK-based Phytopharm, which in turn licensed
drug giant Pfizer the following year for P57 development and global marketing,
while the CSIR kept the patent.
Given rising obesity trends in the Western world, the market for this natural
anti-hunger drug could reach billions of dollars.
In July 2001, describing research progress on P57, a Pfizer spokesperson in
the UK linked the Hoodia to the San but said they were extinct.
An international outcry followed and the South African San Council, set up in
November 2001 and representing the Khomani, the !Xun and the Khwe, threatened a
lawsuit. Negotiations with the CSIR followed and the San demanded recognition of
their knowledge and a share of benefits.
"We played quite a hard ball, we pleaded and demanded and cajoled and we
got a good deal," said the San's legal counsel, Roger Chennels, recalling
how both sides bargained.
A human rights lawyer, Chennels had processed land claims and other rights
issues for the San for a decade.
"The San are the first and the last people: first on the land but their
social statistics are at the bottom of the ladder," said Chennels. Poverty,
disease, alcoholism and lack of education and jobs are rampant - conditions that
are not uncommon among many indigenous peoples.
The resonance of the case for South Africa, with its history of dispossession
of African people and devaluation of their culture, is huge.
"We apologise to the San for having ignored them," said Dr
Marthinus Horak, manager of CSIR's bioprospecting programme, speaking at a
workshop on biopiracy held during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg last year.
The apology turned into the agreement signed last Monday in Andriesvale, near
the Transfrontier Kgalagadi Park. The San are blazing a trail in the new field
of protection and ownership of indigenous knowledge, even before South Africa
has put in place the relevant policies and laws.
One problem is that traditional knowledge, being community-owned and handed
down through generations, clashes with international property rights, which view
knowledge as owned by an individual or a company.
To complicate matters further, indigenous knowledge is often held by
communities across national borders. In this case, the San Councils of Namibia,
Botswana, Zambia and Angola will share the monies in percentages to be decided
at their next general meeting.
Income will go into a San Hoodia Benefit trust set up by the CSIR and the
San. The Trust includes representatives of the CSIR, the regional San Councils,
the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA), and an
observer from the South African Department of Science and Technology.
The San plan to spend the money on education, skills development and create
jobs for their people, who are among the most marginalised and poorest in the
region.
"We need jobs first and, second, education in our language," said
Tina Witbooi, 23, a local trainee tracker.
Since colonial settlers imposed Afrikaans and English, the San language was
driven to near extinction, so the San Institute records the language and, most
importantly, gets the elders to teach it to children.
Some of the last speakers were at the ceremony, their faces sculpted by
weather, sun and age in the reddish-copper colours of the Kalahari.
Ragel van Rooi walked aided by a stick painted with traditional San symbols.
She wore a colourful flowered skirt. A pale blue scarf framed her wise eyes. Van
Rooi did not know her age but neighbours estimated she must be about 70.
"I am happy that others can benefit from our plants," she said,
when asked about the meaning of the day to her.
"Yes, but it would be wrong if fat white people overseas get slim thanks
to us while our children go hungry and uneducated," replied Magdalena
Kassie, 30, a community development facilitator with the South Africa San
Institute in Upington, 225 km away.
"We lost our land and language, we were killed, driven out and
demeaned," said Kxao Moses, WIMSA chair and a San from Namibia. "This
agreement is a positive example, for once people are not exploiting us, as was
the norm."
"It was the right thing to do," said Minister of Arts, Culture,
Science and Technology, Ben Ngubane.
[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 2003]
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