By Lucas Lelardoux Oliger
Biopiracy is the illegal appropriation of traditional native knowledge and resources by governments, businesses and universities. This usually involves patenting the active ingredient of a traditional native remedy. The natives who are at the origin of this traditional knowledge are not notified or paid.
Numerous examples of this are noted each year, mostly in the global South. One prime example is Monsanto in India during the 2000s. But does it happen in Quebec, or even Canada? I talked to Thomas Burelli, a professor of civil law at the University of Ottawa who focuses on international environmental law, to clarify the situation.
“There’s no commonly agreed upon definition of biopiracy,” he says. With no official framework, this concept remains open to shifting points of view by activists, as well as to evolutions in practice.
The Indian eco-feminist and anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva railed against the phenomenon in the 1990s. She argued that biopiracy is “the ultimate expression in the commercialization of science and the merchandising of nature… Life itself is being colonized.”
Abuses and Pillages
Emerging biopiracy scandals mostly happen in emerging countries. Numerous have taken place in South America, Africa and Asia. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen in the West, where the biopirates usually come from.
In Canada, suspicions have been raised from the exploitation of balsam fir, spruce and even arctic char. One example is the production by big companies of Spruce Gum, a medication traditionally used by the Dene people. But Prof. Burelli doesn’t see this as a “serious and heavily mediatized case like we see abroad.” Why not?
Burelli has spent part of his career battling a French organization, the Institut de recherché pour le développement (IRD). The scandal concerned the IRD’s asserted ownership of the tropical plant Quassia amara (also known as amargo) as the result of a study of traditional remedies for malaria used by the native tribes of Guyana.
He says that Canada’s First Nations are less inclined to give over their traditional knowledge to outsiders. They are protected “by virtue of their powers of self-determination, governmental management, and the possibility of establishing their own definitions,” all obtained a few years ago, after centuries of being dispossessed.
Exercising your right to decide means gaining power. Canada gives native organizations the opportunity to set rules and negotiate contracts. That doesn’t happen in a lot of other countries, like France.
Quebec universities are considered leaders in using ethical methods in this domain. Take the accord at the beginning of the 2000s between the James Bay Cree and a group of researchers on antidiabetic therapies. It is often cited as a precedent.
Key Procedures
Even though the accord is dormant today, it allowed key procedures to be put in place in the fight against biopirates. These involve cooperation with natives as well as access to and sharing of benefits between the parties. Native peoples are considered partners, not just simple sources of information that businesses, researchers or governments access and use at their will.
Big pharma’s research into biological resources “is over,” says Burelli. He adds that “Pfizer in Amazonia, that was 30, 40 years ago.” Actually, many still worry about a new form of biopiracy: Digital Sequence Information, or DSI. That is a term that refers broadly to genomic sequence data and other related digital data. This includes the details of an organism’s DNA and RNA, which determine its characteristics and unique traits.
Data bases on genetic resources are freely accessible. It’s much easier to access and quickly appropriate knowledge that may be native in origin. No need to explore, nor to worry about recognizing property rights. “The law is way behind on this,” laments Burelli.
DSI represents the future of research. Many researchers already use it daily. The abusive use of this data, some of which may involve biopiracy, is very difficult to detect. Native communities are not compensated nor consulted for any DSI data they may be responsible for. This is a subject of international negotiations,. No conclusions have yet been reached.
There’s “a lot of money to be made” with DSI as well as field research, says Burelli. Which explains why for a few years “it has been rarer and rarer to identify new cases” of traditional biopiracy.
Considering all this, do we have cause to be optimistic in terms of the rights of natives to control their traditional knowledge in Quebec? “Yes,” says Burelli. “We’ll have fewer and fewer cases of biopiracy because people, especially the younger generation, are very well informed on questions of ethics and respect of their rights.”
Nonetheless, it’s necessary to remain conscious of new challenges in this domain. Many interests work in the shadows. Behind the data bases, it’s too easy to remain unaware of what might be going on.
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