U.S.-COLOMBIA: Free Trade Without Biopiracy?

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jun 16 2004 (IPS) - Biopiracy could be a sticking point in the free trade negotiations that the United States is pursuing with three of the countries with greatest biodiversity in the world: Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

Making biopiracy a priority issue is the spokesman for the three Amazonian and Andean South American nations in talks on the proposed agreement’s chapter on intellectual property, Luis Angel Madrid, an official and expert from Colombia’s foreign trade ministry.

The three are members of the Andean Community of Nations (CAN), which since 1969 has been working to create a common economic area along with Venezuela (which Washington did not invite to the trade treaty negotiations, presumably due to differences with the Hugo Chávez government), and Bolivia, which is expected to join the talks when they are farther along.

The second of eight rounds of negotiations for the free trade agreement is meeting this week in the southeastern U.S. city of Atlanta, and intellectual property rights is one of the issues on the table.

”The United States has been patenting the biodiversity of the Andes in a practice that we do not hesitate to call biopiracy, and we are going to make it very clear (in the negotiations) that we don’t like it,” Madrid told IPS.

”Biopiracy” is the illegal appropriation of biological resources or traditional knowledge, which often has been passed down through generations during millennia in indigenous communities.

The draft text the negotiators are considering says in its eighth article that each country should allow patents for ”inventions” including plants and animals, and diagnostic, therapeutic and surgical procedures for treating humans or animals.

”The Andean regulations (under the CAN agreement) prohibits us from patenting plants and animals,” Madrid said of the text.

As such, material that can be patented must be a human creation with some degree of invention and, above all, with some economic or industrial application.

”The chapter on intellectual property is offensive. (The U.S. negotiators) only want to extend the advantage they already have. In fact, the greatest emphasis has been placed on copyright,” especially in the chemical pharmaceutical area, said the ministry official.

”The United States isn’t interested in negotiating (access to genetic resources) because it has already been accessing them unilaterally,” but Colombia ”wants to take the offensive on the biodiversity issue, which is the only one that is regulated by an (international legal) framework – CAN’s,” he added.

CAN recognises the vast biological diversity of the Andean and Amazonian regions and their genetic resources as holding ”strategic value in the international context.”

The biodiversity rules were adopted by the five-nation bloc in 1996 and take legal precedence over the national legislation of each country. They recognise the rights of indigenous, African-American and peasant farmer communities ”over their traditional knowledge, innovations and practices associated with genetic resources and their derivative products.”

But they also establish national sovereignty over the genetic resources and their derivatives, a point that makes indigenous leaders uncomfortable, so they are seeking rights over both of them in their ancestral lands, where indigenous communities apply collective knowledge in the conservation and use of plant and animal species.

In Madrid’s opinion, ”the U.S. rules are not as precise as the Andean rules, and we are going to defend the Andean system for access to genetic resources.”

The Colombian official spoke Friday with José Soria, secretary-general of the Organisation of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon (OPIAC), in a first-ever meeting, convened by the Interior and Justice Ministry’s directorate for minority groups, and attended by environmental authorities. IPS was the only news media present.

Madrid told Soria, the only Indian in attendance, that the government wants ”the communities to be involved in the trade negotiations, so that there is a wary eye” on the process and to begin a dialogue afterwards that would be expanded to include the Afro-Colombians to ”hear opinions about issues that directly affect them.”

The 90 indigenous groups in Colombia do not surpass two percent of the national population of 44 million; in Peru, the indigenous population constitutes 47 percent of the 26 million inhabitants; and in Ecuador, 43 percent of the population of 13 million is indigenous.

In Colombia, there are more than a million people of African descent living in small, traditional communities, many of them living in the jungle environment along the coast.

The Colombian constitution recognises indigenous state authority over some 31 million hectares, more than 27 percent of national territory. And a special law establishes the Afro-Colombian communities’ collective ownership of around 800,000 hectares in the northwest department of Chocó, home to the world’s highest concentration of biodiversity, according to experts.

The U.S. proposed text is not completely confidential, but nor is it totally public. At the explicit request of the U.S. negotiators, its content is not available on the Internet and the governments that have been invited to participate in the talks have also been asked not to disseminate it in the mass media.

But at the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Trade, the text is available but cumbersome to use: one could ostensibly copy the text, by hand, reading from a public computer terminal that is blocked from producing digital or print copies.

”In the text there is no attempt, for now, to appropriate anything. Access to genetic resources is not being negotiated and we are not negotiating traditional knowledge,” said Madrid.

Colombian territory covers just one percent of the world’s land surface, but it holds 10 percent of all species of flora and fauna, and is second in biological wealth only to Brazil, according to the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute.

Experts estimate that 38 percent of the country remains biologically unexplored. Colombia is the world leader in diversity of bird, flower, butterfly, lizard and frog species.

According to critics of the trade treaty with the United States, clause B (referring to diagnostic, therapeutic and surgical procedures) could be a heavy blow that would hurt more than just the low-cost medicine industry.

It might also lead to the appropriation of the knowledge accumulated over generations of systematic observation of the natural environment and passed down orally through the generations, in what Marceliano Guerrero, a traditional doctor of the Uitoto Indians of the Amazon, refers to as the ”oral principle”.

Indigenous doctors and shamans receive training over the course of 20 to 35 years, and become the most respected members of their communities.

That long dedication to study has yet to be recognised as comparable to the formal academic careers of doctors and professors.

By observing the ripening process of certain fruits, some of these wise ones in the Amazon are able to forecast an outbreak of malaria months in advance, and thus are better able to protect their people from the disease, having them avoid consumption of certain animal fats and fruits.

It remains to be seen whether traditional knowledge like this will be respected in the definitive version of the intellectual property chapter in the free trade treaty that Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are negotiating with the United States.