Posted on 4-10-2002

Scramble for Green Gold Kills Asian Biodiversity
By Kalyani

NEW DELHI, India, October 2, 2002 (ENS) - The quest to commercialize plant
genes by transnational companies and national governments is destroying a
wealth of genetic resources and livelihoods across the Asia-Pacific region,
says a report released Tuesday.

"Plants are vanishing so quickly that...one major drug [becomes] extinct
every two years," said the coauthors of the report, Genetic Resources
Action International (GRAIN), a Barcelona based campaigns group, and
Kalpvriksha, an Indian environmental organization. "Overall, communities
are increasingly losing control over their own plants and are being
increasingly exploited for their knowledge," the authors claim.

The report, called "Traditional Knowledge and Biodiversity in Asia-Pacific:
Problems of Piracy and Protection," examines the plight of people in the
region who rely on plants - such as turmeric and basmati rice, and trees,
such as the neem of India and the mamala of Samoa - for food and medicine.

A global push for the green gold - the commercial use of genetic resources
- by companies with foreign as well as national bases, is leading to the
loss of precious plant life in the region that stretches from India and
Malaysia to China, the Philippines and Pacific islands such as Fiji and
Papua New Guinea, the report says.

Applications by several U.S. companies for patents over products from the
neem tree, used as a source of fungicide in India for over 2,000 years,
have been opposed by farmers and by local and international nongovernmental
organizations.

Some NGOs, notably the British group ActionAid, have responded to such
patent applications by themselves seeking official permission for ownership
over, for example, conkers, the fruit of the horse chestnut tree that is
the focus of a game popular during fall among British schoolchildren. These
groups argue that traditional knowledge, especially that of indigenous
people, has been brought under the control of legislation on Intellectual
Property Rights (IPRs), internationally recognized rules covering "owners
of ideas, inventions and creative expression."

As with laws governing the possession of physical property, IPRs allow
owners "to exclude others from access to or use of their property."

But the report explains that the patent system does not work for
traditional knowledge holders because the collective nature of traditional
knowledge makes it impossible to identify an individual inventor or even a
geographic location.

The required patenting criteria of novelty may not be possible if the plant
remedy has been in use for generations. And, the cost of applying for a
patent and protecting it against infringement may be prohibitive, the
report points out.

With annual global sales of products derived from plant genes estimated at
between US$500 billion and US$800 billion, according to the GRAIN report,
"many countries, and the large businesses they support, increasingly want
to control these resources and the knowledge associated with them for
commercial purposes."

Many Asia-Pacific governments are under intense pressure from
industrialized countries to adopt bilateral IPR agreements on traditional
knowledge, GRAIN reports. The United States, for example, signed an
agreement with China in January 1992, requiring it to amend Chinese
national IPR laws. In 2000, Vietnam signed a similar agreement with the
United States.

Pharmaceutical companies have recently turned their attention to kava
(Piper mythesticum), a report by the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS) confirms. Kava is a cash crop in the Pacific,
where it is valued for a ceremonial beverage. The GRAIN report mentions
kava as an example of bioprospecting that operates to the detriment of
indigenous peoples. Over 100 varieties of kava are grown in the Pacific,
says the AAAS, especially in Fiji and Vanuatu, where it was first
domesticated thousands of years ago. In North America and Europe, kava is
now promoted for a variety of uses. French company L'Oreal, a global giant
with US$10 billion a year in sales, has patented kava to reduce hair loss
and stimulate hair growth. "Traditional knowledge provides useful leads for
scientific research, being the key to identifying those elements in a plant
with a pharmacological value that is ultimately destined for the
international markets," the GRAIN briefing says.

It concludes that "industry is making deeper and deeper inroads, with
increasingly active support from governments, while the mechanisms to
protect and strengthen the rights of communities are still experimental and
weak. "While there are a lot of developments [aimed at protecting
communities] on paper," said Shalini Bhutani, GRAIN's regional program
officer for Asia, "we find that the people's concerns are not being
adequately reflected in national or international fora."

The report recommends that governments consider alternatives to
Intellectual Property Rights contracts which would enable greater
protection of traditional knowledge. The authors call for stronger network
building among NGOs and for the documentation of traditional knowledge.

GRAIN and Kalpavriksh urge governments to bolster the rights of indigenous
people to control the genetic resources that are the underpinnings of their
livelihoods.

The full briefing report is online at:
www.grain.org/publications/tk-asia-2002-en.cfm

{Published in cooperation with the OneWorld Network.}