Preventing biopiracy

Many of the drug therapies are described first, not in the medical or pharmaceutical literature, but in the anthropological literature as indigenous case studies. This may represent centuries of accumulated expertise in the use of the fauna and flora, and environmental management of community held lands and indigenous reserves.

During the Freedom Week celebrated in India in 1999, large numbers of local Jaiv Panchayats served notices to the corporate biopirates and to the World Trade Organization. The Jaiv Panchayat Living Democracy movement picked five cases of biopiracy by transnational corporations: W R Grace for Neem, Sabinsa for Black Pepper, RiceTec for Basmati, Calgene for Mustard and Erand and Pioneer/ Dupont for Mustard.

Corporations are stealing ancient knowledge and patenting it for their own gain and profit. This means that indigenous people and the rest of humanity will have to pay for access to the knowledge that will have thus been commodified. Furthermore, the indigenous peoples themselves are being patented by pharmaceutical corporations and the US administration, under the auspices of the Human Genome Diversity Programme. More and more people oppose the patenting of all life forms and the corporate monopolistic control of seed, medicines and traditional knowledge systems and human genomes.