I have just read Chapter 4, "Ethnobotany Blues" of Michael Brown's book,
Who Owns Native Culture?. The book is interesting, and is telling me a lot I had not known about the interaction of intellectual property rights and the movement to protect the cultures of indigenous peoples.
There is an accompanying website which is now serving as a clearinghouse for information about the struggles over control of these cultures.Much of the chapter is about the
International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) program that was started in early 1990's by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The program provided grant funding for such groups and is still continuing.
I was involved in the creation of the program from USAID, and want to take this opportunity to respond to the chapter. In general, I think Brown, an anthropologist, did a good job in the chapter and in the book as a whole, and in fact the chapter provided me information that I had not had because I lost contact with the program when I retired from USAID in 1996.
The ICBG did screen plant species for candidate chemicals for development of new pharmaceuticals. Each funded group included a partner capable of carrying out such screening, and this purpose was a justification for NIH's central role in its management. (The commercial firms participated on their own dime, and did not receive grant funds from the government.) Indeed, part of the justification for the program was that it took advantage of new screening techniques developed by industry that made the screening process more efficient that such processes had been in the past by allowing simultaneous screening for several kinds of activity. The public subsidy to the program as a whole was in part justified by the hope that there would be an emphasis on screening for drugs against the diseases of the poor in developing countries, which is of relatively little interest to commercial firms due to limited markets for such products.
The ICBG also did systematic botany (and one project I recall systematic studies of insect species), identifying species present in ecosystems and their distribution, and seeking to collect examples as well as to discover new species. This aspect was the interest of the NSF. Brown's two case studies (Peruvian Amazon and Chiapas Mexico) both involved the collection of plant species from under-collected areas, and their deposit in appropriate collections where they would be described and maintained. Indeed, one of the features that interested me in the science of the effort was the likely expansion of knowledge about the way evolution had distributed useful compounds across species.
The program focused on developing nations since that is where one will find more diverse plant species, and species less likely to have been studied in universities and corporate labs. We, the organizers and our consultants, of course understood that traditional uses of such plants by indigenous cultures for medical purposes could provide indications that the species involved would be chemically active. However, collection and screening was not to be limited to or even focused primarily on species used in traditional medical practice. We also assumed, correctly I still believe, that very large investments would be required to find any pharmaceutical of commercial value after appropriate leads had been developed through screening of plants.
USAID was interested in the program first to assure that funds were available to make it possible for scientists from the countries where the collections would be made to be fully involved and for those collections to be deposited in appropriate institutions in their home country. It was recognized that such involvement was imperative to leave added scientific capacity in the country, and that such investments were not likely to be made by industrial firms, nor by U.S. universities nor U.S. government domestic science agencies. USAID was also involved because of the belief that showing the potential economic value of the biodiverity in developing countries would encourage their conservation. The potential to develop new drugs against malaria and other tropical diseases was also an inducement.
The program sought to find innovative solutions to recognizing the moral rights of those from which collections were made to benefit from things found in those collections. We prepared the field by consulting experts, asked each group seeking a grant to make an appropriate arrangement and describe it in the grant proposal, and had those arrangements carefully reviewed in the proposal review process and incorporated in grant documents. Of course, we didn't know what we were doing, as this appeared to be breaking new ground. Unfortunately, Porter's chapter suggests we didn't do a good enough job in dealing with IPR, and that problems have arisen in some of the groups. On the other hand, his chapter suggests that ethnobotanists are better at dealing with IPR now than they were 15 years ago, and I hope that that is in part the result of the interest we created and the experience that was gained from the ICBG program.
As I said, the book is useful, as is this chapter. However, I have some problems with it. One is that the chapter did not describe the nature of the ICBG fully, focusing unduly on the degree to which it would lead to commercial exploitation of traditional knowledge.
Especially of concern is the fact that the author did not speak for the potential beneficiaries of the drugs that might be developed from the ICBG research. He describes later in the chapter the development of anticancer drugs as a result of materials found in plant sources. Do the tens of millions of people who might benefit from such a discovery have no right to health and longevity if the tribe living where the plant was first used object?
The chapter failed to deal with the history of granting intellectual property rights for pharmaceutical development. That is not historically an old phenomenon, but it has grown rapidly in the 20th century. I think that there is more than a correlation between the development of the intellectual property rights domain, the growth of research pharma, the rapid development of pharmaceutical technology, and the reduction of some kinds of disease burdens. Surely intellectual property rights law can be improved and will need to be modified to meet changing needs, but Brown should at least consider the possibility that it is better at encouraging the development of new and important drugs that alternatives before us, including the alternative of protecting the cultural traditions of indigenous peoples.
I happen to believe that the basis of U.S. patent law is appropriate. Knowledge should be in the public domain. Patents are granted in part to prevent knowledge being guarded as a trade secret. They grant only a temporary exclusion of others from certain, commercial applications of new knowledge. They do so in order to stimulate innovation.
I personally see little utility in giving people a perpetual right to exclude others from the exploitation of knowledge developed by their ancestors, which is apparently what some people want for the pharmaco-medical knowledge of indigenous peoples.
This approach, if taken to its logical conclusion, would exclude all such indigenous peoples from the use of knowledge developed not only in advanced Western societies but also by other indigenous peoples. Obviously, the balance would be negative for the very people we seek most to help and protect. (Check out my recent posting on the
Nine Wonders of Intangible Heritage.)
The chapter does make an interesting and probably valid point that the institutions of indigenous societies are different than ours. As a consequence, not only is it sometimes difficult for scientists and businessmen from the United States to identify appropriate representatives of indigenous communities, sometimes the very effort to do so is doomed to fail because the communities have not institutionalized such representation and will not properly understand the questions as to who is to represent them. Equally, NGO's seeking to take up the cause of the indigenous population against the outside scientists and businessmen may find it impossible to find an appropriate authorizing agency (although they seem less sensitive to the problem than did the scientists we funded.) The worst scenario is when the scientists and business people feel that they have been authorized by one group who legitimately represents the community, the NGO feels that it is authorized to speak for a different group which it feels legitimately represents the community, and the two groups are rivals and disagree!
The chapter deals with Shaman Pharmaceuticals, a firm that pioneered the use of ethnobotany in its research to develop new pharmaceutical products and which sought to feedback some funding to the communities from which it got its leads. The chapter recognizes that far from making huge profits, the company lost lots of its investors money. It has since failed entirely. The business of bioprospecting is a hard one, and one not likely to reward unwary investors. It is not the profit bonanza pictured by the press and NGO.s.
I must admit the discussion of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) made me angry. This NGO was apparently very active in opposing bioprospecting by commercial firms in areas in which indigenous peoples lived, on the basis that they considered such efforts exploitive. Of course, I am all for people expressing their views and advocating for the weak. However, I disagree fundamentally with RAFI (which apparently has since changed its name to the
ETCGroup but continues to "address the socioeconomic and ecological issues surrounding new technologies that could have an impact on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable." RAFI is now apparently advocating against a range of technologies from biotech to nanotech which offer real hope to help indigenous peoples.
I feel that the media tends to pay undue attention to NGO's that oppose technologies. Years ago
Douglas and Wildavsky suggested that in our modern age NGO's could survive and thrive by making loud charges against "pollution", thereby gaining lots of small donations from people slightly interested in their charges. I fear the media finds the controversy generated by such NGO's worthy of broadcast, since it interests audience and draws attention, which in turn draws advertisers and revenues. We need a media that gives more weight to expert scientific judgment and less weight to populist alamists.
