Bioprospecting and its discontents: Indigenous resistances as legitimate politics

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, July-Sept, 2001 by Chikako Takeshita

Bioprospecting Versus Biopiracy

The "Win-Win-Win" Rhetoric

Bioprospecting proponents promote pharmaceutical biodiversity prospecting as a "win-win-win" project that simultaneously realizes three mutually dependent benefits or objectives. First is the pursuit of novel chemical compounds useful for the development of new drugs to combat cancer, AIDS, and other diseases through studying biological material found in biodiverse regions. Second is the long-and short-term compensation offered to source country collaborators, which generates economic activities in developing nations with rich biological resources. Finally, bioprospecting projects are expected to create more motives for biodiversity conservation as more people recognize its value as a reservoir of future genetic resources.

This "win-win-win" rhetoric is what broadly justifies bioprospecting projects. Pharmaceutical bioprospecting projects are mostly conducted in biodiverse regions in the developing world such as the Amazon and Mexican forests, where the number of unexplored genetic and biological resources is enormous. Stakeholders include scientists, ethnobotanists, businessmen, governments, and environmentalists, who bring different expertise and agendas to bioprospecting and participate in constructing and reinforcing the rhetoric. Biodiverse areas are often populated by indigenous peoples that have inhabited the area for generations and developed a considerable amount of knowledge of surrounding natural resources. Ethnobotanists studying indigenous usage of plants promote the value of exploring and preserving indigenous knowledge of natural resources--medicinal plants, in particular--and hope to utilize them in scientific communities. Indigenous communities in biodiverse regions are often enlisted by bioprospectors as local collaborators, with expectations that their people and knowledge will play particular roles for the bioprospecting endeavor. In brief, indigenous knowledge is expected to provide information that facilitates the discovery of valuable natural resources; and indigenous people are simultaneously information providers as well as executors of biodiversity conservation--regardless of indigenous peoples' own perceptions of such projects.

This "win-win-win" rhetoric assumes that "benefits" will flow to local collaborators. The Convention on Biological Diversity (GBD) signed in 1992 at the Rio summit formally recognized sovereign rights of nations to their biological resources and mandated the equitable sharing of benefits with parties providing the resources. (4) The CBD's article 8(j) specifies that if indigenous knowledge contributes to the generation of commercial profit, the knowledge providers are entitled to "equitable benefit sharing." (5)

Bioprospectors generally recognize that, before 1992, there were problems such as not sharing the benefits derived from biological resources with source countries and overharvesting developing countries' biological resources. But optimists hold that the CBD became the pivotal point where the dark past of biopiracy and environmental degradation turned into a bright future of benefit sharing and biodiversity conservation. (6) Bioprospectors pledge their adherence to the CBD and to providing "equitable benefits" to indigenous people for their collaboration and knowledge. However, they often fall short of making efforts to investigate the local people's perspective on what makes an equitable compensation. Pharmaceutical companies generally prefer to defer to a third party to decide how compensations should be distributed to local communities, if at all. (7) Often the bioprospector's emphasis is on the legality of the bioprospecting activity, and "equitability benefit sharing" is either left in ambiguity or largel y constructed through the rhetoric, which is built and mobilized by the more powerful stakeholders.