The road from the airport at Tuxtla Gutiérrez to San Cristóbal in Chiapas, Mexico wends its way from balmy tropics to cloud covered mountains; a remarkable diversity of topography and climate for a drive of less than two hours. Those extremes of climate and topography make Chiapas rich in plant biodiversity. It is this diversity which has long made the region attractive to botanists—and to so-called bioprospectors seeking plants which can be turned into pharmaceutical drugs, pesticides, or other marketable products.
But this region is also home to indigenous Mayan peoples, many of them very poor, who have long suffered social and political discrimination. Political awareness also runs high. The Zapatista uprising began here in 1994, and in 1998 when an international consortium of research institutions and a drug company announced a $2.5 million project called ICBG Maya to research local plants for possible commercial exploitation, it didn’t take long for a group of indigenous healers to raise questions: Who would benefit from the project? And how would the interests of the local Maya, who had extensive knowledge of the region’s plants because they’d used them for centuries, be represented? The Council of Indigenous Traditional Midwives and Healers of Chiapas (Compitch) began an international campaign to shut down ICBG Maya. They argued that Mexico lacks the legal framework for such projects, that the project would provide no substantial benefits to the local communities, and that the communities involved had not given their prior informed consent. In short, they dubbed the project not bioprospecting, but biopiracy. Finally last November, El Colegio del Frontera Sur—known as Ecosur—the Chiapas-based Mexican partner in ICBG, withdrew its support, effectively cancelling the project.
“Indigenous peoples are asking for a moratorium on all biopiracy projects in Mexico,” Compitch secretary Antonio Pérez Méndez said in a statement issued after Ecosur’s decision was announced.[1] Don Antonio, as Pérez Méndez is respectfully known, is a 57-year-old traditional Maya hierbero, which translates loosely as herbal doctor. Earlier in the year, he had traveled around the United States, speaking against the ICBG Maya project during a tour sponsored by the San Francisco-based group Global Exchange. In November, in a statement distributed by the Canadian group RAFI, which also backed the Compitch campaign, Don Antonio said a moratorium was needed, “so that we can discuss, understand and propose our own alternative approaches to using our resources and knowledge.[2] We want to ensure that no one can patent these resources and that the benefits are shared by all.”
In Brazil, indigenous healers have also called for a halt to bioprospecting until the thorny issues such projects raise can be resolved. But if the ICBG Maya story brings into focus questions of world-wide importance about indigenous rights and intellectual property, it is not a simple tale of greedy corporations vs. once-innocent locals. For also involved in the project were a whole list of public institutions that see their mission as protecting the environment by reviving research on plant-based medicines, as well as a U.S. researcher who had already spent four decades working with the region’s Maya communities.
Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the ICBG Maya project was to include researchers from Ecosur, the University of Georgia, and Molecular Nature Limited, a small Welsh pharmaceutical company. It was one of several International Cooperative Biodiversity Group (ICBG) projects that the National Institutes of Health funds in Asia, Africa and Latin America. All were designed to combine bioprospecting with conservation and economic development.
The project had been conceived and was directed by Brent Berlin, a world-renowned ethnobiologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Georgia who is fluent in Spanish and Tzeltal Maya. Berlin and his wife Elois Ann, also a professor of anthropology at the university and member of the ICBG Maya project, have worked in Chiapas for over 40 years. In contrast to anthropologists who have focused on the spiritual dimensions of traditional Maya medicine, the Berlins have emphasized the scientific value of the Maya’s use of medicinal plants—a philosophical clash that became increasingly important in the dispute over the project.
As originally envisioned, the project was to create a new civic organization and trust called Promaya—which stood for “Protection of Maya Intellectual Property Rights”—to administer royalties in the event a drug was discovered. The royalties were to have been divided equally among Promaya, the University of Georgia, Ecosur and Molecular Nature. Despite all the hype over “green gold,” Berlin has insisted that the possibility of discovering and patenting a new pharmaceutical was exceedingly remote. Instead, when questioned about benefits to local communities, he would point to some 25 Maya trained in laboratory and transcription techniques and some $80,000 in laboratory equipment the project donated to Ecosur; had the project received the go-ahead from the Mexican government, the equipment would have been used to start a regional natural products industry. Berlin also points to 46 communities in the Chiapas highlands that signed agreements accepting the project. Like Don Antonio, he quotes Zapatista texts on indigenous autonomy—though the Zapatistas themselves have added their voice to the call for a moratorium on bioprospecting.
As the debate over the project continued, it became increasingly polarized, with accusations of lies, spies, cultural and scientific ignorance, all wrapped around the complex debate over the privatization of knowledge and the commercialization of biodiversity. In the summer of 1999, the project started in earnest, with the Promaya trust still not established. Teams of Maya collaborators began conducting surveys and collecting plants. The way Don Antonio saw it, his plants and his knowledge were being robbed.
Compitch, where I first met Don Antonio in August 2000, is located in San Cristóbal, a kilometer and a world away from the touristy center of town. It’s a collection of squat, uninspired buildings with three tall Mayan crosses at the entrance. Inside is an herbal garden, and a small museum dedicated to traditional Mayan medicine. In addition to hierberos, Compitch includes parteras (midwives), hueseros (bonesetters), rezadores, who offer prayers to the nearby mountains, and iloles, who, like their counterparts in Chinese medicine, listen to their patients’ pulses to diagnose their illnesses. In a small workshop, Compitch members were preparing herbal remedies; Don Antonio sold me several packets of eucalyptus and other herbs he said would be good for a nagging cough.
It was election week in Chiapas, but the members of Compitch were meeting to discuss the ICBG Maya project. Throughout the spring, federal environmental officials had tried to broker negotiations. The sessions had not gone well. At one point, Elois Ann Berlin became exasperated and declared that scientists didn’t need to go around informing non-governmental organizations about their research. There was a clash over allegations that Brent Berlin had stolen live plants from Chiapas, planted them in Georgia and was now conducting biotechnological experiments. The allegations were unfounded; the distinction between collection for “scientific” purposes and collection for the purposes of conducting bioassays for drug discovery was either ignored or considered irrelevant by those opposed to the project.
Mexico requires permits for plant collection, though the rules are confusing and ever-changing. From June through November 1999, over 35,000 plants had been collected for scientific purposes using a pre-existing permit obtained for Ecosur. Berlin may have thought he was following the rules, such as they were. But to his critics, the fact that collecting had begun at all, was evidence that the project was going much too far, too fast.
To obtain the consent of the Maya-speaking highlands communities, the project had developed a one-hour play that was performed and narrated by Maya members of the ICBG. To Compitch, that was hardly enough; the play did not present the larger picture required for “informed consent.”
Among those I spoke to in San Cristóbal was a medical doctor who had come to Chiapas 20 years earlier to work in a government program. Unlike many young physicians dispatched to Chiapas from urban universities, Rafael Alarcón was fascinated by traditional Mayan medicine and decided to stay on. It wasn’t just plants, he explained. It was a whole way of life, a whole philosophy and belief system. He worried that conflict in Chiapas was taking its toll on young people, who were further removed from that belief system. Alarcón was bothered by the fact that he saw too many people with the chronic respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases of poverty. He insisted that the ICBG Maya project wasn’t the kind of research the region needed: New plant-based drugs might turn out to be wonderful for breast or lung cancer, but that’s not what was needed the most in Chiapas. Alarcón added that he sometimes thought the whole thing ironic. How could researchers come to Chiapas, listen to people for years, and then try to re-package what they learned to those very same people?
Meanwhile, at Ecosur, researcher Luis García said that last thing anyone wanted was anything that caused more division in Chiapas. García is an agronomist who studies traditional farming practices that are often more beneficial than so-called modern farming for many local communities. He saw the ICBG Maya project as a way to further that research through the discovery of alternatives to chemical pesticides. Still, he was somewhat reticent. Ecosur was founded about 25 years ago, with a mission that focused on conservation, sustainable development and health and population studies; García maintained that Ecosur had always had a positive relationship with Compitch. But the controversy over the ICBG project was beginning to take its toll, jeopardizing other work in the Highlands. In the summer of 2000 he was still hopeful that the project would continue, but was also increasingly convinced that the controversy had taught him something—Ecosur needed to re-think its relationship with indigenous communities and re-think the way research projects were designed and organized.
In the meantime, environmental officials had decided that there would be no permits for any specimen collecting, whether for scientific or biotechnological purposes. In September, several prominent Mexican academics added their signatures to a petition calling for a temporary moratorium on bioprospecting in Mexico; the timing was just not right, they said. A Mexican non-governmental organization in San Cristóbal began circulating a five-part Internet series called “Pukuj and Biopiracy,” and Brent Berlin found himself linked to Pukuj, a particularly nefarious Tzeltal/Tzotzil version of the devil. In October, Ecosur decided to put the project on hold and not re-apply for collecting permits unless two conditions were granted: 1) clear and firm regulations on bioprospecting, and 2) the formation of a representative indigenous political organization with whom agreements on scientific research could be negotiated. The Federal Attorney General for the Environment declared another high-profile bioprospecting project to be invalid. That project involved an agreement between the National Autonomous University (UNAM) in Mexico City and Diversa, a biotech company in San Diego; the Attorney General ruled that the University had no authority to enter into such an agreement.
The first year of the new millennium had ended badly for the Chiapas project, which was increasingly affected by criticism of the global pharmaceutical industry. “AIDS Gaffes in Africa Come Back to Haunt Drug Industry Back Home,” reported the Wall Street Journal in an article that began with an observation on the latest novel of spy-thriller master John le Carre: The bad guy was a sinister pharmaceutical giant called KVH.
But Mexico had a new president, the first from a party other than the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in over 70 years, and Chiapas had a new governor, a former PRIista, who had run as an opposition candidate. One of the first things that President Vicente Fox had done after he was elected was travel through Latin America, stopping in Costa Rica to visit one of the first government-private industry bioprospecting initiatives. The Berlins thought that the change in government at both the state and national level boded well for their project.
But in 2001, Mexico’s Congress passed only a watered down version of an indigenous rights bill which had been negotiated in 1996 as part of a peace accord with the Zapatistas. Missing in the final version was the provision for communal ownership of natural resources. The Zapatistas denounced the bill, which was rejected by the Chiapas state legislature and remains mired in myriad proposals to “reform” the “reform legislation.”
Meanwhile, Fox had launched a project called the Plan Puebla-Panama, a major infrastructure project that was supposed “to ensure that the fruits of globalization reach all corners of Mexico.” The plan had the support of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, and was roundly denounced by environmental and other groups. [See “Plan Puebla-Panama,” p. 24] It seemed inevitable that the ICBG Maya project would be pulled into a larger battle over indigenous rights and development for a long time to come.
Still, Berlin found reasons to be hopeful about the project’s future. One of the communities that had participated in the project formed a non-governmental organization. That meant it could enter into agreements with funding agencies and sign conventions to participate in research projects. “At the local level, the efforts of the Maya ICBG project indicate that the Maya themselves are assuming a more direct role in their destiny in these ‘new times’ for Mexico,” he wrote in his report to NIH in February of 2001.
But which Maya? Who represented the Maya? Was Don Antonio not part of the “new times” for Mexico?
Soon after he returned from Global Exchange’s Biopiracy Tour, Don Antonio issued an alert on the Internet: “We thought the matter of the biopirating of our medicinal plants…was over. But this man doesn’t understand and he is insisting on carrying out his project. He has sought another way to rob our plants. Mr. Berlin has promoted and supported the formation of another indigenous organization to carry out his ends.”
Finally, in an effort to keep the project alive, Berlin submitted a revised proposal to NIH that eliminated the drug discovery portion of the project—the bioprospecting—and instead would use the final two years of funding to “focus on the development of mechanisms and standards for obtaining prior informed consent (PIC) in the context of bioprospecting in Mexico, an issue that is central to all future projects relating to natural products discovery.” There would be workshops, training, an information campaign and a task force. NIH was willing to sign on, but despite last-minute efforts on the part of the Chiapas state government and the U.S. Embassy, Ecosur was not. Last October, when Ecosur director Pablo Liedo issued a statement announcing the research institute’s withdrawal from the project, he also called upon “social and indigenous organizations, relevant government entities, and the national academic community to promote a rational discussion and assume the responsibility of defining the legal framework necessary to make better use and manage our country’s natural resources.”
As they had so often in the past few years, the Berlins maintained that “the real losers are the Highland Maya communities themselves who once again have been denied the opportunity to participate as legitimate players in a changing world over which they now have little control.”
For its part, Compitch issued a statement, asking the forgiveness of those it may have injured during the long campaign against the project, and thanked Ecosur for its decision not to accept the revised proposal, “because under the direction of Mr. Berlin that training was going to conclude…in an imminent confrontation among communities…and more problems for us.”
The ICBG-Maya project was over, but the questions and controversy it raised would not disappear so easily.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Barbara Belejack is the managine editor of The Texas Observer. She is a frequent contributor to NACLA.
NOTES:
1. ETC Group, News Release, “Mexico Biopiracy Project Cancelled,” November 9, 2001. http://www.rafi.org/article.asp?newsid=279.
2. The Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI)—now officially named the ETC Group—is a research and information organization that has played an active role in many international campaigns concerning biotechnology and genetic resource preservation. http://www.rafi.org
