Time running out for pact on biodiversity

Harish Mehta Business Times 18 Mar 08;

TIME may be running out for the proposed United Nations' Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). 2010 was set as the deadline for writing a global Access and Benefit Sharing Agreement that would govern how the world's resources should be shared.

A stumbling block to the agreement is the huge gap that exists between rich industrialised nations that want easy access to the resources of poor countries and the poor countries' desire to prevent those resources being appropriated without proper and fair compensation.

Before an agreement can be reached, the members of the CBD must reach consensus on the actual draft of an access and benefit sharing agreement, and have a final draft ready before 2010.

But many rich countries insist that the access and benefit sharing agreement should not include the extracts and compounds that are derived from genetic resources. On the other hand, the developing countries argue that these derivatives must be included because Western manufacturers make huge profits using these resources that their people have discovered and used for many generations.

The Convention on Biological Diversity, adopted in 1992, has three laudable objectives: to conserve resources, use them in a sustainable manner and, above all, share the financial benefits accruing from the resources fairly. The contentious issue of how the resources should be shared has defied resolution so far. Even after 14 years since the CBD came into existence, there is no agreement on the core issue of access and benefit sharing.

The lack of an access and benefit sharing agreement is not the only lapse in global trading rules. Yet another anomaly is that while the Convention on Biological Diversity at least recognises the sovereignty of states and communities over their genetic resources, the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) does not.

The WTO requires its member countries to comply with TRIPS. The existing intellectual property rights regime neglects the traditional knowledge of non-western states and communities.

But Asian and African countries have taken heart from the knowledge that indigenous communities and farmers hold most of the world's biological resources.

In the past, Europeans and Americans and Japanese simply took their resources without compensation, and used them to produce pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and agricultural products.

As a result, the developing countries have had to tackle biopiracy, which occurs when foreign companies patent indigenous resources.

Developed countries such as the US (which has signed the CBD, but has not ratified it), Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Japan, do not even accept the concept of biopiracy, or acknowledge that biopiracy poses any threat to the economic well being of poor countries.

These countries dismiss or downplay recent acts of biopiracy in which firms were granted patents for Indian basmati rice, and the neem tree and Thai jasmine rice.

Now biopiracy has become rampant in Africa. Multinational companies profit from biological resources taken from Africa, yet do not share benefits with Africans who have discovered and maintained these resources. Tewolde Berhan Egziabher from the Institute for Sustainable Development in Ethiopia argues that the multinationals are 'stealing the loaf and sharing the crumbs'.

Multinational companies have obtained thousands of patents on African plants. These are patents on thaumatin, a sweetener from a plant in West Africa; brazzeine, a protein taken from a plant in Gabon that is much sweeter than sugar; teff, a grain used in Ethiopian flat bread; the African soap berry, and the Kunde Zulu cowpea; and on genetic material from the west African cocoa plant.

In every instance, these plants were bred, cultivated or gathered locally for their properties by the indigenous people. The developing countries are correct in arguing that legal safeguards must be provided in the CBD's proposed access and benefits sharing agreement in order to prevent biopiracy.

They argue that national laws are incapable of apprehending biopiracy because the acts of biopiracy have historically taken place in the US and Europe, where patents have been granted under American and European laws.

There is an urgent need to not only reach an agreement on the access and benefit sharing agreement, but to also reform the TRIPS agreement. Both these agreements need to take into account the intellectual property rights of the developing countries, and set out clear rules on how the indigenous people will be compensated.

Unfortunately, the convention is now in danger of being turned into an instrument of neocolonialism. Biopiracy is not a local problem. It is a trans-national problem requiring a trans-national solution.

Toronto-based Harish Mehta was formerly BT's Indo-China correspondent