Biopiracy: Challenges Before India

Introduction

The events of biopiracy are occurring more frequently than before all over the world, especially in the southern hemisphere. The victims, in most of the cases, are the developing world, especially the countries in Southern hemisphere like India, South Africa, among others, which are rich in biodiversity. Developing and underdeveloped of Southern hemisphere is the source of 90 per cent of the world’s biological wealth. India, for example, has 81,000 species of fauna and 47,000 of flora, including 15,000 plant varieties unique to the country. In spite of this richness, these countries hold only 3 per cent of patent worldwide. Industrial countries, on the other hand, hold 97 per cent of all patents and are driving the rush to patent plant genetic resources (Baxter, 1999).

Bio-piracy indicates unauthorized use of bio-resources of a country either by the individuals or institutions or companies of other countries. It refers to “appropriation, generally by means of patents, of legal rights over indigenous biomedical knowledge without compensation to indigenous groups who originally developed such knowledge” (Sudha, 2014). Naturally, the countries with enormous bio-resources, like India, became the victims of biopiracy. It is a mere coincidence that the major share of global bio-resources was possessed by the poor underdeveloped or developing countries. These poor countries are being the victims of biopiracy practised by the rich countries.

The indigenous communities of bio-resource rich countries, by their intense search for food and medicine, discovered various parts of plants and animals useful for the purpose. The entire human race then got benefitted from their discoveries, but none of them claimed anything in return. But the invention of biotechnology in the 1970s changed the scenario a lot. The multi-national companies of the developed countries, like DuPont, Syngenta, Pharmacia, Dow an Aventis, certainly discovered immense profit prospect from the use of this knowledge of indigenous communities. The plundering of this traditional knowledge along with the bio-resources of the underdeveloped countries started with immediate effect. These multi-national companies, thereafter, started patenting the products they developed by using this knowledge and bio-resources in their own name. For example, the farmers in the north-west of Mexico have long been producing a bean which is an important staple and also an important source of income of them. In 1994 Larry Proctor, a US citizen collected this seed. He then developed a new variety of this bean from the mother seed. The new variety was different from the original one only in colour. The new variety had a yellow coat. Mr Proctor called the variety ‘Enola’ and applied for a patent. He was granted a patent in 1999 by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The patent was later assigned to his seed company POD-NERS.

It is against this malpractice of developed countries a Canadian activist Pat Mooney first coined the term bio-piracy (Mgbeoji, 2006). After obtaining the patent right, the MNCs started accusing underdeveloped countries of pirating or unlawfully appropriating their intellectual property rights. It is at this juncture the Third World Countries started counteracting First World Countries of misappropriating the knowledge of their indigenous people. This allegation of misappropriation was then termed bio-piracy. Bio-piracy is thus meant for an unauthorized appropriation of bio-resources and associated knowledge regarding their uses without making proper compensation to the indigenous people who originally possess this knowledge, and to the countries as well who owns the biological resources.