ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Capitalising on Biodiversity

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 28 2000 (IPS) - Recognition of the enormous economic value of biodiversity is leading Brazil to give a new direction to development of its Amazon jungle region, which up to now has been based on activities that pillage the area’s natural resources.

The Brazilian Programme of Molecular Ecology for Sustainable Use of Biodiversity (Probem), designed in 1997, is aimed at making the Amazon region a source of high value-added products and advanced scientific know-how, especially through the use of biotechnology.

The need to conserve natural wealth and develop eco-tourism was late in gaining recognition in Brazil, whose Amazon region is home to as many as half of all the world’s insect species and over one- fifth of plant species.

The programme is aimed at changing the current model of economic growth in the region, which is based on the extraction of wood and minerals, ranching and one-crop farming – activities that destroy the forests.

In addition, indigenous people and other long-time residents of the region will also benefit through remuneration for their contributions to the development of new products, such as their traditional knowledge of the medicinal properties, food value and cosmetic and aromatic uses of native plant or animal species.

That wealth of knowledge held by forest-dwellers represents “a long distance already covered” in terms of the research process to be undertaken by local or foreign investigators, said Mary Allegretti, the Environment Ministry’s secretary of coordination for the Amazon region.

Last week Probem was endowed with a financial mechanism enabling its implementation: a fund for financing biotechnology projects and for paying royalties to local residents.

The mechanism was inspired in the Permanent Alaska Fund created by the United States in 1977 for the payment of royalties from oil in exchange for environmental conservation and the payment of indemnification and dividends to Eskimos/Innuit. The successful experiment had already accumulated 27 billion dollars by 1998.

Any companies or institutions interested in developing products based on substances found in the Amazon will have to associate themselves with Bioamazonia, a mixed organisation set up by the Brazilian government in conjunction with the scientific community and representatives of civil society to administer Probem.

Bioamazonia has been equipped with the Amazonian Biotechnology Centre, as well as a financial instrument, the Permanent Fund for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of the Biodiversity in Amazonia (FPBA).

The biotechnology centre is a complex of 26 laboratories and services under construction in Manaos, the capital of the state of Amazonas, which has established links with a countrywide network of universities and independent institutes that has already begun carrying out Probem projects.

To set up the FPBA fund, Bioamazonia turned to the Axial bank, a unique financial institution specialising in investments in the environment, especially biodiversity.

Founded three years ago in Sao Paulo by Swiss businessman Pierre Landolt, Axial obtained one million dollars in aid from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to get the FPBA off the ground.

The goal is to attract some 150 million dollars in private investment over the next two years, while the government plans to contribute 48 million dollars to Probem by 2003.

Companies interested in biological material and data obtained by Bioamazonia will pay a fee that will go into the fund, explained Axial director John Forgach.

As in prospecting for oil, companies doing research on biological substances found in the region will be subject to bidding and paying for concessions and to paying royalties from the products developed and marketed, he added.

Probem, however, still faces a legal hurdle: it depends on passage of a law regulating access to Brazil’s genetic resources.

Given that legal vacuum, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which makes authorisation by the State in question necessary for the removal of any genetic material, applies. Without government authorisation, the removal of any biological substances by foreigners is illegal, Environment Minister Jose Sarney Filho pointed out.

But “not everything is bio-piracy,” and rules are needed to allow companies seriously interested in developing biotechnological products to carry out their “biological prospecting,” said Allegretti.

Biotechnology is a multi-billion dollar business. Global profits from pharmaceutical products alone amounted to 300 billion dollars in 1998, and around 40 percent of the medicines were based on natural substances, according to Bioamazonia. And to that must be added the profits from perfumes, cosmetics, foodstuffs and industrial inputs.

Brazil boasts the world’s greatest biodiversity. The Amazon region alone is home to 10 to 15 million of the world’s 30 million species of insects, and 22 percent of all plant species – “extraordinary wealth,” in Forgach’s words.

But since the logic of the marketplace means a policy limited to cracking down on activities damaging to the environment will not be successful on its own, that natural wealth must be converted into profits in a sustainable manner, in business endeavours in harmony with the conservation of biological diversity, said Allegretti.