By Pratap Chatterjee
LIMA, Mar 6 1997 (IPS)

Deep in the heart of the forests of the Peruvian Amazon, a man silently and swiftly draws his machete across the white bark of a croton tree. At once, a thick frothy liquid the colour of blood begins to trickle down the blade.

“Put this on a cut and it will heal quickly,” says the man as he catches the sap in a plastic bottle. Called ‘sangre de grado’ or ‘sangre de drago’ (blood of the dragon), this sap is a popular folk cure used in the countries of the Amazon.

Today, truckloads of sangre de drago and similar medicinal plants are extracted and shipped out of the forests of this region to consumers in Germany, Japan, and the United States.

And the indigenous peoples from these forests are actively courted by international researchers in the hope that some of their other traditional medicines may cure diseases like cancer or AIDS.

A team of scientists recently spent three weeks collecting folk medicines with some of the Aguaruna peoples in their home territory, Maranon, which is named after the river that descends through the forests of the eastern slopes of the Andes in northern Peru.

Led by Walter Lewis, a scientist from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, the team included researchers from the universities of San Marcos and Cayetano Heredia in Lima.

After initial analysis of the 200-odd plants that were collected on the first expedition at the local university laboratories, about 20 plants were flown to Chicago in the United States for further analysis in the laboratories of Searle, a subsidiary of Monsanto, the multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical company.

The collection is being conducted under three special contracts signed between the universities, the Aguaruna peoples, and the drug company.

The agreements are unprecedented, because they give greater benefits to the local people than any such plant collection accords signed so far. It also involves one of the first agreements between a drug company and a group of indigenous peoples.

Throughout recent human history, rainforest products have been turned into commercial medicines ranging from quinine, an anti malarial drug that was discovered in Peru, to the rosy periwinkle of Madagascar, that is now used to treat blood cancer in children.

Although the healing properties of these plants were discovered by the local communities who shared this knowledge with outside researchers for free, the drug companies who capitalised on this knowledge to make multi-million-dollar profits have never bothered to compensate the communities for their research.

This agreement started out in a similar fashion. In December 1993, Walter Lewis, a scientist from Washington university who is leading the project, was awarded one of five grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) programme.

The ICBG programme provides research teams with 400,000 dollars a year for work including drug discovery and conservation work. All the projects are conducted in conjunction with multinational drug companies such as American Cyanamid, Bristol-Myers-Squibb, and Shaman Pharmaceutical.

When Lewis first went to the Maranon, he did not tell the local people that he had a contract to turn collected plants over to Searle for possible commercial exploitation of the drugs. Thus, when the Consejo Aguaruna y Huambisa (the Council of the Aguaruna and Huambisa peoples) discovered the arrangement in 1995, they evicted him from the forests.

Lewis has worked to strike new agreements with other Aguaruna groups over the last two years. He turned to two Lima-based groups — Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental (SPDA or the Peruvian Society for Environmental Rights) and the Peruvian national indigenous organisation, CONAP.

Cesar Sara-Sara, the Aguaruna leader of CONAP, was flown late last year to meet the NIH and Searle in Maryland and Missouri respectively, where he negotiated the new agreements to allow Lewis to return to the Maranon.

Today, Washington University and Searle have a ‘license option agreement’, and the Aguaruna have a ‘know-how license agreement’ with Searle. Washington University and the Aguaruna also have a ‘biological collecting agreement’, under which the indigenous peoples get about 10 percent of the ICBG grant.

Brendan Tobin, an Irish software lawyer who once worked for SPDA and who helped Sara-Sara draw up the agreements, says the accords allow the Aguaruna to be compensated in four stages.

The Aguaruna get an annual ‘know-how’ license fee for sharing their knowledge and they get ‘collection fees’ for each plant collected. Eventually, if a drug is discovered, the Aguaruna will get ‘milestone payments’ from the company before commercialisation and finally they get royalties from the sales.

The four-year agreements are ‘non-exclusive’, which means they are designed to ensure that the Aguaruna retain all rights to continue collecting and using their own plants as well as to market these plants elsewhere.

Tobin says that Searle has also agreed not to use the plants in any way that “violates the Aguaruna world-view”. Such use would include genetic engineering.

The issue arose partly because Monsanto, Searle’s parent company, is one of the world’s leading producers of genetically engineered products. The company has patents on genetically engineered cotton, potatoes, soybeans, and tomatoes, and is now working on altering canola and corn.

Many of these crops have been engineered to make them resistant to Roundup, an extremely potent herbicide also manufactured by Monsanto.

“This is a very important part of the process,” Lewis said. We have to get ‘prior informed consent’ from the communities before we start collecting on what we can use and how we can use it.”

“So far things are working very well,” he said. “We have collected poisons for fish and humans which may have anti-cancer properties, medicines to treat fleas, ringworm and lice. We also gathered plants to treat inflammations and topical fungal infections.”

To help him in this work, Lewis has hired Ricardo Apanu from Yamayakat village to coordinate local work.

Lewis also plans to discuss possible reforestation projects in order to fulfill the third part of the NIH programme. He also plans to conduct parataxonomy and ethnobotany classes in August so that local people may continue to classify their plants by themselves.

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