[Pirateninfo] Fw: Benefit sharing is dead - Devinder Sharma

[Martin Sundermann]

http://www.gmwatch.org
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Biodiversity and IPRs
Benefit sharing is a dead concept

By Devinder Sharma

News report of the failure of the most written about benefit sharing
partnership from India – involving the Kani tribes in Kerala, the Tropical
Botanic Garden and Research Institute at Thiruvananthapuram and a
pharmaceutical company – comes at a time when Hawai lawmakers are under
pressure to put a hold on research based on Hawai'i endemic species until it
is decided how to regulate such research and how to share any profit that
discoveries might produce.

The Kani tribe story, which was more or less a public relations exercise for
the policy makers, academics and some civil society groups who needed a
justification for their own involvement in facilitating exploitation of
biodiversity and the traditional knowledge that comes along with it, has now
turned into a global showcase for biological theft. The TBGRI had initially
encouraged 50 Kani families to undertake cultivation of arogyapacha plant
species. The benefit every year was expected to be in the range of Rs 20,000
to Rs 30,000 per acre.  The income was expected to increase every year with
the demand for leaves likey to go up. All that the Kani tribes have received
so far is Rs 5 lakh (US $ 12000) as one-time payment when the product was
licensed and a royalty of Rs 2,000 (US $ 5).

The traditional knowledge that the Kani tribe provided that led to the
development of India’s wonder drug Jeevani, which is known to enhance
immunity levels and has anti-fatigue and anti-stress properties on the other
hand has a commercial value estimated to be in the range of at least US $ 50
million to 1 billion. A US-based company, NutriScience Innovations, is
already using internet channels to market the drug. The end result has been
disempowerment, and an undermining of local communities’ capacity to
maintain their own biodiversity-based livelihood strategies.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) describes benefit sharing as a
fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of
genetic resources, including by appropriate access to genetic resources and
by appropriate transfer of relevant technologies, taking into account all
rights over those resources and to technologies, and by appropriate funding.
Effective regulation of access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing is
currently one of the principal focus of international negotiations relating
to the CBD and the Plan of Implementation arising from the World Summit on
Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002.

This definition has been used very cleverly used by researchers and policy
makers, including international agencies like the World Trade Organisation
(WTO), World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) to push forth the industrial interests and in
the process turning a blind eye to the rights of the native communities who
preserved the knowledge. While voluntary guidelines and several option for
equitable sharing of benefits and technology transfer are being tossed
around, the fact remains that control and misappropriation of proprietary
rights over genetic resources and traditional knowledge continue to be
strengthen unabated in the meanwhile.

Knowing that the international organisations, including the CBD secretariat,
are merely providing a helping hand to pharmaceutical companies and academic
institutes in accessing precious biological resources, native groups and
some environment organisation in Hawai, are calling for scrapping a contract
struck two years ago between the UH Marine Bioproducts Engineering Center
and a San Diego biotech company called Diversa. The way research has been
conducted and how proceeds from the work will be distributed have become
concerns among native groups. This has strengthened the belief that research
will produce profits for industry with no benefit to native communities,
forcing some of the Indian tribes to pass laws banning the harvesting of
living things on their property.

State Representative Ezra Kanoho, who chairs the committee on water, land
and Hawaiian affairs, has said in an interview that the contract gave the
US-based Diversa exclusive rights to the discoveries based on research on
environmental samples collected from Hawai'i's ocean resources. The Honolulu
Advertiser says two bills, one originating in the Senate last session and
one introduced this year in the House, are therefore aimed at establishing a
moratorium on bioprospecting -- referring to scientific research aimed at
finding a useful and profitable application for a process or product in
nature.

Bioprospecting however, comes in handy for university researchers to provide
unlimited access to valuable genetic resources at a throwaway price. Take
the case of Papua New Guinea, a hotspot of biological wealth and knowledge.
Under the aegis of a International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) --
a misleading title for a so-called partnership consortium mainly between the
University of Papua New Guinea and the US National Institute of Health and
the University of Utah, among others -- the University of Papua New Guinea
is taking a lead role in executing a US $ 4 million project aimed at the
search for marine organisms and plant species that contain chemical
properties for treatment of tuberculosis, malaria, cancer, HIV and other
diseases.

Already, a random plant collection and inventory for anti-tuberculosis,
anti-malaria, anti-HIV and anti-cancer drugs in the last three years has
resulted in the collection of 250 plant samples from about 120 plant species
for testing. Papua New Guinea is excited at the benevolence of the ICBG (US
$ 4 million, much of it going to US researchers), which will help in
capacity building by teaching the local researchers in preparing an
inventory of plants, collection of ethno medicinal plant species,
preparation of extracts and screening them. It will also enable the
researchers to learn the process of economic valuation of natural products,
developing intellectual property rights legislation and conduct outreach
programmes to educate communities into further sharing their knowledge.

The US National Institute of Health and the University of Utah will in the
bargain make a neat US$26 billion a year, if the drug discovery programme in
Papua New Guinea proves successful. In any case, the US $4 million
investment in Papua New Guinea is peanuts by any known international
standards. This classic case of unbridled biological theft and exploitation
comes at a time when meaningless international negotiations continue
unabated. The Papua New Guinea benefit sharing example is in tune with the
earlier and equally exploitative experience of Costa Rica that has been
hailed by the pharmaceutical industry as well as researchers and policy
makers as a success story.

The National Institute of Biodiversity of Costa Rica (INBio) had in 1991
signed an agreement with the multinational Merck Sharp and Dome "to
collaborate in the investigation of the existing biodiversity in Costa
Rica's tropical forests in order to establish its potential application to
human health and animals." Subsequently, INBio signed similar bioprospecting
agreements with the cosmetic company Givaudan Roure in 1995 to explore the
potential of biodiversity fragrances and aromas, which could be eventually
synthetically reproduced. In 1996, it signed an agreement with another
company Indena Spa to procure antimicrobial compounds to be used in
cosmetics. Three years later, it also entered into an agreement with the
US-based Diversa to explore new enzymes in acquatic and terrestrial
mincrorganisms.

Numerous other agreements involve ICBG (the group operating in Papua New
Guinea), British Technology Group, University of Massachusetts,  University
of Strathclyde, NASA, American Development Bank, University of Cornell, and
pharma company Bristol Myers Squibb. InBio has so far signed 11
international agreements on behalf of the Costa Rica government.
Significantly, InBio provided unrestricted access to scout the tropical
forests for a paltry fee. Costa Rica alone is home to five per cent of the
world's biodiversity worth several billion dollars, and all it has managed
to get in return is US 2.6 million.

>From Merck and Co., InBio got US $ 1 million for the first phase of the
project (it has been extended twice since then). In addition, it received
laboratory equipment and required material for processing the plant and
microorganism samples. While the percentage of royalty accruing from the
products dervied from the explorations is being kept confidential, Merck
enjoys the exclusive right to draw patents. If the INBio-bioprospecting
programme is being construed as a successful benefit sharing experiment, it
will be useful to know what will constitute an exploitative collaborative
effort. In simple words, it is like selling oil for the price of water!

Not drawing any lessons, India which is home to 45,000 plant species,
merrily goes on documenting traditional knowledge. Plant and soil samples
are being regularly flown out of the country in the name of joint research
collaboration. Some years back, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's
directive to the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) – the
umbrella organisation for public-sector agricultural research – not to allow
individual institutes to go into scientific collaboration with research
institutes abroad, was met with a strong opposition. ICAR has in fact
announced a prize of Rs 5,000 for the best contribution of traditional
knowledge that it manages to document every year.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) too is involved
with documenting traditional knowledge without first ascertaining the flow
of benefits, if any. Both the organisations support a network of civil
society groups and institutes that receive a nominal funding in the name of
documentation of innovations. Interestingly, the benefit that flows back to
the community is a series of annual awards, which includes a small cash
component and a plaque. And invariably, it is the 'empowering of local
communities' and 'equitable benefit sharing' that is used to justify the
misdemeanour. Both the government agencies in reality are busy selling the
'green gold' literally for peanuts, not realising that plant and animal
biodiversity is to India (and for that to other developing countries) what
oil has been for the Middle East.

The debate however will go on, and the corporations and the research
institutes will continue to exploit the local communities for traditional
knowledge. What therefore needs to be done immediately so to draw the
international attention to this vexed problem, is to follow what Mexico did
to a mischievous ICBG programme for bioprospecting. A five-year US
government initiative "Drug Discovery and Biodiversity among the Maya of
Mexico" aimed at identifying, patenting and commercialising Mayan knowledge
and pharmacologically important biological materials through private
biopharmaceutical enterprise and the University of Georgia, was finally
shelved after two years. The project intended to collect and evaluate
thousands of plants and microorganism used in traditional medicine by Mayan
communities in order to promote drug discovery. It also proposed to patent
and privatise resources and knowledge.

Many indigenous communities opposed the commercial exploitation of their
genetic resources and traditional knowledge, even though the project was
designed to foster benefit sharing so that local communities could derive
benefits from their biological resources. After two years of local
opposition from indigenous peoples' organizations in Chiapas, the
bioprospecting project was finally cancelled.

There is no other way out. Or else, the developing countries will be made to
sell the 'green gold' virtually free of cost in return for the 'benefit
sharing' candies. #

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(Devinder Sharma is a New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst.
Contact: dsharma at ndf.vsnl.net.in)