Biopirates in the Americas

With the establishment of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the United States government and major American transnational corporations hope to obtain unlimited access to Latin America's vast biological riches. Control of biodiversity is an element of increasing importance in the competitive advantage of corporations and nations, for it is the raw material of the genetic revolution in what some analysts refer to as the "Biotech Century." The businesses that covet biodiversity -- pharmaceutical and agrochemical corporations, as well as upstarts in the budding fields of genomics, proteomics and bioinformatics -- comprise a veritable biological industrial complex that seeks control of health and nutrition worldwide.

Once a biological resource with commercial potential is identified, the corporation that "discovered" it can claim a patent on it, and thus turn what was once freely available to all into private property. Corporations are applying for patents on everything from trees and rice varieties to proteins, gene sequences and human stem cells. All living organisms and their components are patentable.

Unfortunately for Corporate America, most of the world's biodiversity is outside the borders of the United States and is concentrated mostly in the tropical countries of the Third World. In Central and South America, for example, the concentration of biodiversity resources is impressive:

Biologists John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto counted eight tree species in a one-hectare (2.47 acre) plot in northern Michigan, while in a plot of the same size in Nicaragua they counted over 200 tree species.

Costa Rica, with only a tenth the size of France, has three times as many vertebrate species.

In the Peruvian Amazon, American biologist E. O. Wilson identified 43 ant species inhabiting a single tree.

A single hectare in the Ecuadoran Amazon is home to approximately 400 tree species, as well as 96 species of grasses and 22 kinds of palm trees.

If geography is a disadvantage, the biological industrial complex has one countervailing advantage: the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO's intellectual property rights agreement confers legally binding character to patents, meaning that all WTO member countries must honor all patents filed in the United States or face economic sanctions known as cross retaliation. In the Americas, the corporations can also count on the intellectual property rights provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the proposed FTAA, which are even more favorable to patent holders.

The hunt for biological riches in areas of high biological diversity is known as bioprospection. But for indigenous peoples and rural dwellers all over the world and international NGOs like GRAIN and the ETC Group, today's bioprospectors are no better than the colonial plunderers of yesteryear. They perceive that in the five centuries since Columbus the agenda has remaind the same: Obtain biological resources for the creation of lucrative value-added products. Indigenous and rural peoples, who nurtured and managed these resources for millenia, do not receive any royalties. Sometimes their role as custodians and protectors of biodiversity is not even acknowledged. They do not call it bioprospection, instead they prefer to call it biopiracy.

"Biopiracy, and patents based on it, are equivalent to enclosing the biological and intellectual commons, while dispossessing the original innovators and users", said Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva. "What was available to them freely and what they have contributed to is converted into a priced commodity, and they will have to pay royalties each time they use it."

Bioprospection or biopiracy?

Bioprospection, or biopiracy, is not a futuristic scenario but a reality. In 1998 the U.S.-based Diversa Corporation signed a deal with the Mexican government to obtain access to the biodiversity of Chiapas. Also in Mexico, British company Nature Ltd. is exploring traditional Maya knowledge of medicinal plants with $2.5 million from the International Cooperative Biodiversity Group (ICBG), an American public-private consortium that includes the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture.