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Bolzano / Bozen, 23 September, 2003
"Should a vaccination against AIDS ever be found, it will
be in the Amazon Rainforest". With this and other arguments,
big companies sneak into the Amazon rainforest in order to
export, mostly illegally, vegetal and animal species that may be
used to produce new medicines. This phenomenon, called biopiracy,
consists in the theft for business use of intellectual resources,
i.e. therapeutic know-how and techniques of native peoples, and
of biological resources belonging to regions that are rich in
biodiversity. The Amazon regions of Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil,
Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Suriname and Guyana, already
impoverished by other forms of exploitation, are being threatened
by this new form of aggression.
Biopiracy first started about 15 years ago, and is carried out in
several ways. Firstly, traffickers may disguise themselves as
tourists, collect mushrooms, animals, seeds and plants and send
them abroad. Secondly, they may buy areas of tropical forest and
use them to conduct different experiments in order to classify
species. Thirdly, they may enter local communities with various
excuses, with the aim of obtaining know-how about the resources
they intend to use. Once they are taken, biological species are
copyrighted abroad and used to obtain different products that are
put on the market. In this way, the original owners of biological
species and know-how, i.e. the indigenous peoples, have no access
whatsoever to the profits that originate from this
business.
Numerous cases of biopiracy take place in the Amazon region. The
best known concerns Ecuador and the patent of Ayahuasca. During
the 1980s, Loren Miller, the owner of a pharmaceutical laboratory
in the United States, managed to get several plants of Ayahuasca
from the Cofán people. Once he arrived back in the United
States, he patented the plant species. In 1996 the Coordination
of the Organisation of Native Peoples of the Amazon Basin (COICA
- Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la
Cuenca Amazónica, www.coica.org ) took legal action in
order to have the patent revoked, given that Ayahuasca is sacred
to the peoples of the Amazon, who have been using it for hundreds
of years. The patent was withdrawn, but Miller eventually managed
to get the plant patented again in 2001.
Always in Ecuador, 750 "Epipedobates Tricolor" frogs were stolen
and then patented in the United States. Epipedobates Tricolor
produce Epibatidine, a pain reliever 200 times stronger than
morphine. Another famous case of biopiracy is that of
Yacón, in Peru: thanks to its properties the plant, a
sweet but not fattening tuber, might be used as a substitute for
sugar. Involved in the illegal exportation of Yacón are
the International Center of Potato (Centro Internacional de la
Papa) and the Peruvian authorities. The latter, despite knowing
that seeds of Yacón were being taken abroad, did nothing
to prevent it. This caused a huge economic loss for Peru and
other countries that have cultivated Yacón for centuries.
According to several studies, the illegal trafficking of
biological species and know-how causes the Amazon region over 10
billion USD annual losses.
The Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für
bedrohte Völker - GfbV) calls for immediate action in order
to stop biopiracy. From a political standpoint, all the
commitments that were taken on at the Congress on Biodiversity
must have priority over commitments that were taken on by
governments in other occasions, for example during the World
Trade Organisation negotiations. Moreover, intellectual property
rights must exclude patents regarding living organisms or parts
of them. Finally, access to genetic resources or know-how must be
obtained solely with the permission of native peoples and local
communities and must not clash with collective rights.