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RIGHTS: Reversing Worldwide History of Exploitation of Indigenous Peoples
By Mercedes Sayagues
ANDRIESVALE, South Africa, Mar 28 (IPS) - It looks like an ordinary cactus
- thin, thorny fingers growing less than a metre tall in the reddish sands
of southern Africa's Kalahari Desert - but on Mar 24 the Hoodia Gordonii
reversed a worldwide history of exploitation of indigenous peoples.
At a simple but moving ceremony in Andriesvale, a remote corner of the
Kalahari, the South African San Council and the Council for Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR) of South Africa signed an agreement that
recognises and rewards the San as holders of traditional knowledge.
The San will get up to eight percent of profits from a diet drug
derived from the Hoodia, a plant they know well. For thousands of years,
the San - the oldest people in southern Africa - have chewed the bitter
Hoodia twice a day to suppress hunger and thirst during long hunting trips.
"Our ancestors taught us to survive by being attentive to the land,
rain, game and plants," says Kxao Moses, a Namibian San and chair of the
Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa. Even today the
San treat hunger, fever, eye allergies and stomach pain with the Hoodia.
In 1996, scientists from the parastatal CSIR isolated the Hoodia's
hunger-suppressing chemical component, or P57, and patented it.
In 1997, CSIR licensed the UK-based firm Phytopharm to further develop
and commercialise P57. The following year, Phytopharm licensed drug giant
Pfizer - of Viagra fame - to develop and market P57.
Throughout, CSIR retained the patent. It may be worth billions of
dollars. The market for a natural appetite-suppressant drug is huge. In the
United States alone there are between 35-65 million clinically obese
people. Worldwide, obesity is rising fast.
The San, who had shared their knowledge with CSIR scientists, were out
of the picture. To the extent that, in mid-2001, when a Pfizer spokesperson
in Britain described P57, the San were said to be extinct.
The San peoples of southern Africa angrily complained. An international
scandal ensued.
The timing was right. Back in 1996, indigenous knowledge was an
abstruse issue and the CSIR is an institution still shaped by the apartheid
regime it had served well for 40 years.
Five years later, protection of indigenous knowledge is debated at the
World Trade Organisation (WTO) and promoted by the post-apartheid CSIR.
It was a thorny issue at the 2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg because
indigenous knowledge systems clash with Western intellectual property rules
(IPR). The latter view knowledge as the property of an individual or a
company, while traditional knowledge is collectively owned and handed down
through generations.
Under pressure from the developing world - WTO is reviewing the IPR
system. Buoyed by international agreements like the 2000 Cartagena Protocol
on Biological Safety, an addenda to the 1992 Convention on Biological
Diversity, countries in the South are passing laws to prevent biopiracy.
In 1999, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) approved an African
Model Law that comprehensively covers IPR issues for biodiversity and
indigenous knowledge. African countries must now pass domestic laws that
comply with it. Few have done so.
The South African government is considering a draft bill that requires
proof of prior informed consent of communities before granting patents for
products or elements derived from their traditional knowledge.
The agreement between the San and the CSIR reinforces bioprospection as
opposed to biopiracy.
"Big pharma can't do business as they did before. It's payback time,"
says Tom Suchanandan, an academic with the Council for Human Sciences
Research of South Africa.
He points that "this is no hastily construed document but took lots of
time and effort", one reason being the public scandal, another South
Africa's legal vacuum on this matter.
"The CSIR and the San had to produce an agreement able to withstand
international scrutiny and it does," says Minister of arts, culture,
science and technology, Ben Ngubane.
For three years, the South Africa San Council negotiated with the CSIR
on behalf of the San in Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In
a unique novel arrangement, the San will share profits across borders.
The CSIR will pay the San eight percent of milestone payments made by
its licensee Phytopharm during the drug's clinical development over the
next 3-4 years. If and when the drug is marketed, possibly in 2008, the San
will get six percent of royalties.
"The CSIR, being owned by government, was rather embarrassed and we
played that embarrassment hard," recalls human rights lawyer Roger
Chennels, the San's legal counsel.
Already R259,066 has been paid. Milestone payments for the San could
reach R8-12 million while royalties could top R60 million annually during
the 15-20 years before a patent expires, says Petro Terblanche, CSIR
Biochemtek Director.
The San badly needs such windfall. Present in the region for 40,000
years, in the last 2000 they have been dispossessed by several waves of
newcomers. Today, commercial ranching, large-scale agriculture, even
national parks threaten their hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
"The San's soft culture does not do well in a Western capitalist
world," says Chennels.
For centuries their culture has been devalued as "uncivilised". Even
their language is on the verge of extinction, squeezed out by Afrikaans and
English. Less than two dozen elderly San speakers survive in South Africa.
A handful was at Andriesvale to witness their leaders sign the agreement.
Ravaged by low self-esteem, poverty, alcoholism and unemployment, the
San remain marginalised. Only recently a wave of interest is re-valuing San
rock paintings and crafts, their harmony with nature, practices of
heightened consciousness states and cultural beliefs.
"This (agreement) is about more than money, it's about our culture,"
says Tina, a trainee tracker at Molopo lodge in Andriesvale.
Asked about their needs, a group of young women quickly say "jobs and
education in our language".
If the diet drug is produced, it is not yet clear whether the Hoodia
will be grown commercially or the molecule laboratory-produced. "For South
Africa's economy, it is preferable to farm it. For risk management, to use
a reactive in a lab," says Terblanche.
Dreadlocked, decked in an opossum tail headdress, beads and a handmade
leather medicine pouch, community leader Jan van der Westhuysen, 47,
crouches and gingerly touches the prickly plant. "This is life to us, it
gave us energy and sustenance," he says.
He looks around the dry savannah. Hoodia was plentiful here when he
grew up but no longer, he says. "Humans are not taking good care of the
world." (END/2003)
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