Community Autonomy and the Maya ICBG Project in Chiapas, Mexico: How a Bioprospecting Project that Should Have Succeeded Failed

Human Organization, Winter 2004 by Berlin, Brent, Berlin, Elois Ann

There are several sources that form the historical background for our discussion that relate to the environment, human rights, development policy, international regulations and laws, and the r�le of science and scientists in all of the above. Because of space considerations and our own expertise we focus this background discussion on the New World.

As is well known to readers of this journal, the history of human use of natural resources in the humid tropics has been exploitative-almost invariably one finds a scenario of harvest, extraction, and development until the resource is depleted, with no concern for the collateral effects on the environment. Indigenous populations residing in regions where particularly prized natural resources might be found were commonly forcibly removed and relocated or simply killed. It was not until the latter half of the 20th century that these practices of ecocide, ethnocide, and genocide, sometimes promoted as government policy, were effectively challenged (see for example Bodley 1990; Crosby 1986; Lewis 1969; Weiss 1988).

With the accumulation of ecological knowledge based on detailed field studies, the natural and biological resources of the neotropics took on new significance in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Environmentalists became more vocal and persuasive in their arguments for the conservation of biodiversity and a truly global ecology movement began to emerge. The earth's rain forest habitats, especially the Amazon rain forest, came to be characterized as the "lungs of the world." The complex relationship between and among species and the global impact of rapid local environmental change began to be more widely recognized, and efforts to develop comprehensive conservation programs began to have a serious impact on government and private development agencies such as the World Bank.

Almost simultaneously, social scientists and other intellectuals began calling attention to the plight of the aboriginal human populations residing in these regions of severe environmental change. The decade spanning the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s marked a major turning point in the struggle for cultural survival of native peoples of South and Central America. During this period, international attention became focused on the situation of the Indian as never before (as evidence see the 1971 Barbados Conference).1 Support groups with stated goals of aiding indigenous populations by all means possible sprung up in this country and Europe as well as in a number of South American countries, and indigenous groups organized as political units and also as NGOs.2

A major argument put forth in the developing discussion was how much industrialized countries might benefit from the environmental knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples, given that these peoples had served as the stewards and conservators of their environmental resources for centuries. However, it was also clear that if traditional societies were to remain viable, they must have the economic resources to do so. From these ideas arose the concept of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and the extension of intellectual property laws to traditional intellectual property rights (IPR). It was not long until the proposal was put forth that traditional peoples must benefit economically from the use of their natural resources, a concept debated at the first meeting of the International Society of Ethnobiology (ISE) held in Bel�m, Brazil, in 1988. At that important meeting it was concluded that indigenous peoples merited economic compensation for their traditional knowledge and practices regarding biological resources. This was made explicit in Article 4 of the ISE's Declaration of Bel�m (ISE 1988).3