Andean Nations Criticize U.S. Biopiracy of Traditional Indigenous Knowledge

BIO-IPR docserver | http://www.grain.org/bio-ipr
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TITLE: US-Colombia: Free trade without biopiracy? /

AUTHOR: Constanza Vieira
PUBLICATION: IPS News / Noticias IPS
SOURCE: Inter Press Service
DATE: 16 June 2004 / 14 de junio 2004
URL: http://www.ipsnews.net
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U.S.-COLOMBIA
Free Trade Without Biopiracy?

By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jun 16 (IPS) -- Biopiracy could be a sticking point in the free
trade negotiations that the United States is pursuing with three of the
countries with greatest biodiversity in the world: Colombia, Ecuador and
Peru.

Making biopiracy a priority issue is the spokesman for the three Amazonian
and Andean South American nations in talks on the proposed agreement's
chapter on intellectual property, Luis Angel Madrid, an official and expert
from Colombia's foreign trade ministry.

The three are members of the Andean Community of Nations (CAN), which since
1969 has been working to create a common economic area along with Venezuela
(which Washington did not invite to the trade treaty negotiations,
presumably due to differences with the Hugo Chávez government), and Bolivia,
which is expected to join the talks when they are farther along.

The second of eight rounds of negotiations for the free trade agreement is
meeting this week in the southeastern U.S. city of Atlanta, and intellectual
property rights is one of the issues on the table.

''The United States has been patenting the biodiversity of the Andes in a
practice that we do not hesitate to call biopiracy, and we are going to make
it very clear (in the negotiations) that we don't like it,'' Madrid told
IPS.

''Biopiracy'' is the illegal appropriation of biological resources or
traditional knowledge, which often has been passed down through generations
during millennia in indigenous communities.

The draft text the negotiators are considering says in its eighth article
that each country should allow patents for ''inventions'' including plants
and animals, and diagnostic, therapeutic and surgical procedures for
treating humans or animals.

''The Andean regulations (under the CAN agreement) prohibits us from
patenting plants and animals,'' Madrid said of the text.

As such, material that can be patented must be a human creation with some
degree of invention and, above all, with some economic or industrial
application.

''The chapter on intellectual property is offensive. (The U.S. negotiators)
only want to extend the advantage they already have. In fact, the greatest
emphasis has been placed on copyright,'' especially in the chemical
pharmaceutical area, said the ministry official.

''The United States isn't interested in negotiating (access to genetic
resources) because it has already been accessing them unilaterally,'' but
Colombia ''wants to take the offensive on the biodiversity issue, which is
the only one that is regulated by an (international legal) framework --
CAN's,'' he added.

CAN recognises the vast biological diversity of the Andean and Amazonian
regions and their genetic resources as holding ''strategic value in the
international context.''

The biodiversity rules were adopted by the five-nation bloc in 1996 and take
legal precedence over the national legislation of each country. They
recognise the rights of indigenous, African-American and peasant farmer
communities ''over their traditional knowledge, innovations and practices
associated with genetic resources and their derivative products.''

But they also establish national sovereignty over the genetic resources and
their derivatives, a point that makes indigenous leaders uncomfortable, so
they are seeking rights over both of them in their ancestral lands, where
indigenous communities apply collective knowledge in the conservation and
use of plant and animal species.

In Madrid's opinion, ''the U.S. rules are not as precise as the Andean
rules, and we are going to defend the Andean system for access to genetic
resources.''

The Colombian official spoke Friday with José Soria, secretary-general of
the Organisation of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC), in a
first-ever meeting, convened by the Interior and Justice Ministry's
directorate for minority groups, and attended by environmental authorities.
IPS was the only news media present.

Madrid told Soria, the only Indian in attendance, that the government wants
''the communities to be involved in the trade negotiations, so that there is
a wary eye'' on the process and to begin a dialogue afterwards that would be
expanded to include the Afro-Colombians to ''hear opinions about issues that
directly affect them.''

The 90 indigenous groups in Colombia do not surpass two percent of the
national population of 44 million; in Peru, the indigenous population
constitutes 47 percent of the 26 million inhabitants; and in Ecuador, 43
percent of the population of 13 million is indigenous.

In Colombia, there are more than a million people of African descent living
in small, traditional communities, many of them living in the jungle
environment along the coast.

The Colombian constitution recognises indigenous state authority over some
31 million hectares, more than 27 percent of national territory. And a
special law establishes the Afro-Colombian communities' collective ownership
of around 800,000 hectares in the northwest department of Chocó, home to the
world's highest concentration of biodiversity, according to experts.

The U.S. proposed text is not completely confidential, but nor is it totally
public. At the explicit request of the U.S. negotiators, its content is not
available on the Internet and the governments that have been invited to
participate in the talks have also been asked not to disseminate it in the
mass media.

But at the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Trade, the text is available but
cumbersome to use: one could ostensibly copy the text, by hand, reading from
a public computer terminal that is blocked from producing digital or print
copies.

''In the text there is no attempt, for now, to appropriate anything. Access
to genetic resources is not being negotiated and we are not negotiating
traditional knowledge,'' said Madrid.

Colombian territory covers just one percent of the world's land surface, but
it holds 10 percent of all species of flora and fauna, and is second in
biological wealth only to Brazil, according to the Alexander von Humboldt
Biological Resources Research Institute.

Experts estimate that 38 percent of the country remains biologically
unexplored. Colombia is the world leader in diversity of bird, flower,
butterfly, lizard and frog species.

According to critics of the trade treaty with the United States, clause B
(referring to diagnostic, therapeutic and surgical procedures) could be a
heavy blow that would hurt more than just the low-cost medicine industry.

It might also lead to the appropriation of the knowledge accumulated over
generations of systematic observation of the natural environment and passed
down orally through the generations, in what Marceliano Guerrero, a
traditional doctor of the Uitoto Indians of the Amazon, refers to as the
''oral principle''.

Indigenous doctors and shamans receive training over the course of 20 to 35
years, and become the most respected members of their communities.

That long dedication to study has yet to be recognised as comparable to the
formal academic careers of doctors and professors.

By observing the ripening process of certain fruits, some of these wise ones
in the Amazon are able to forecast an outbreak of malaria months in advance,
and thus are better able to protect their people from the disease, having
them avoid consumption of certain animal fats and fruits.

It remains to be seen whether traditional knowledge like this will be
respected in the definitive version of the intellectual property chapter in
the free trade treaty that Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are negotiating with
the United States