Biopiracy by Vandana Shiva

Author:Vandana Shiva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2016-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

Biodiversity: Whose Resource?

Biodiversity has always been a local common resource. A resource is property when social systems exist to use it on the principles of justice and sustainability. This involves a combination of rights and responsibilities among users, a combination of utilization and conservation, a sense of coproduction with nature and of gift giving among members of the community.

There are many levels at which resource ownership and the concept of knowledge and access to it differs between private property regimes and common property systems. Common property systems recognize the intrinsic worth of biodiversity; regimes governed by IPRs see value as created through commercial exploitation. Common property knowledge and resource systems recognize creativity in nature. As John Todd, a visionary biologist, has stated, biodiversity carries the intelligence of three and a half billion years of experimentation by life-forms. Human production is viewed as coproduction and cocreativity with nature. IPR regimes, in contrast, are based on the denial of creativity in nature. Yet, they usurp the creativity of emerging indigenous knowledge and the intellectual commons. Further, since IPRs are more a protection of capital investment than a recognition of creativity per se, there is a tendency for ownership of knowledge, and the products and processes emerging from it, to move toward areas of capital concentration and away from poor people without capital. Knowledge and resources are, therefore, systematically alienated from the original custodians and donors, becoming the monopoly of the transnational corporations.

Through this trend, biodiversity is converted from a local commons into an enclosed private property. Indeed, the enclosure of the commons is the objective of IPRs in the areas of lifeforms and biodiversity. This enclosure is being universalized through the TRIPs treaty of the GATT and certain interpretations of the Biodiversity Convention. It is also the underlying mechanism of bioprospecting contracts.

Central to the privatization of knowledge and biodiversity is the devaluation of local knowledge, the displacement of local rights, and simultaneously, the creation of monopoly rights to biodiversity utilization through the claim of novelty. It has sometimes been argued that monopolies exist even in traditional communities. Yet, in the case of agriculture, for example, seeds and knowledge are freely exchanged as gifts. Similarly, knowledge of medicinal plants is a local common resource.

Plant-based systems of healing fall into two categories— folk systems and specialized systems, like Ayurveda, Siddha, and Unani. Even specialized systems, however, depend on folk knowledge. In the Ayurveda classic, Charaka Samhita, indigenous medical practitioners are advised:

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