Bioprospecting is a relatively new name for a well-established practice. The term was coined by sustainable development advocates in the late 1980s to refer to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries’ renewed interest in the use of plants, microbes and “traditional knowledge” as leads for developing new products. The drug industry’s much-hyped “return to nature,” after roughly 50 years of emphasis on synthetic chemistry, took visible form in a number of high-profile bioprospecting arrangements. The more well known of these included the U.S. government’s ongoing International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) initiative, which has funded drug discovery partnerships between U.S. researchers and collaborators in countries including Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Peru; and a 1991 agreement between the drug company Merck and Costa Rica’s National Biodiversity Institute (INBio).
The novelty of these partnerships extended beyond corporations’ renewed interest in nature. In accordance with the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and a growing body of supporting legislation in signatory nations, as well as demands from indigenous organizations and changes in academic research protocols, efforts to collect biological material for pharmaceutical research and development came with new sets of provisions attached. Bioprospecting initiatives began incorporating contractual promises to return some form of benefits to the providers of plants, microbes, insects and knowledge.
Such benefit-sharing arrangements were the outcome of a number of different demands. Significant among them were powerful critiques on the part of Southern activists, indigenous movements and multilateral organizations of what many call “biopiracy”: the histories of resource appropriation in which Northern states and corporations have built fortunes, empires and nations out of material taken freely from the global South. Claims for social justice that demanded new forms of reciprocity, community consent and recognition of national sovereignty over these resources played a strong role in establishing some of the CBD’s innovative requirements. Most notably, the CBD held that research institutions and corporations provide some form of “equitable returns” to source nations and source communities in exchange for continued access to biodiversity and cultural knowledge.
But social justice and biopiracy critiques were only one aspect of the shift toward benefit-sharing as a new multilateral principle. The CBD also promotes and endorses an explicitly market-mediated vision of biodiversity conservation. The Convention literally banks on the life sciences industries and the increasingly broad scope of patents on forms of life as key engines for “granting value” to biodiversity. Conservation thus becomes indispensable in this vision of sustainable development in which biodiversity is conceived of as a productive resource that “pays for itself.” As the argument has it, the CBD provides “incentives” for the nations of the South to save their forests rather than cut them down. In this view, the benefit-sharing contract is not primarily a mechanism for promoting social justice but, rather, it is framed first and foremost as an incentive structure. As such, the goal of prospecting agreements is to turn oft-conflicting parties—developing nations, indigenous or local communities, the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries—into mutually dependent “investors” and “stakeholders” by attempting to ensure that each has something tangible to gain from the sustainable management of biodiversity.
The CBD’s intervention in the international traffic in biological resources and cultural knowledge turns on two key aspects. One component is the wholesale endorsement of “the market” as a mechanism that supposedly guarantees more biodiversity, more drugs, more health and more community development to the world at large. The other component is the benefit-sharing mandate, interpretable as either contesting or wholly in concert with such privatizations of biodiversity by opening up the field of potential “dividend-holders” and “stakeholders.” This dual move in the CBD redraws jurisdiction over “genetic resources” and “traditional knowledge” by taking them out of the global commons, where they were often treated as free for the taking, and placing them squarely within the sovereignty of nation-states—a victory, of sorts, for Southern governments and activists. As such, the advent of this new form of biodiversity entrepreneurialism has not just meant conceiving of biodiversity as a productive resource—it has also meant turning it into a resource with new kinds of claimants attached.
The CBD’s mandate to “give back” remains in many ways a fragile and contested one. In fact, the United States remains the only UN member-nation that has not ratified the CBD, and its delegation continues to actively militate against the Convention’s provisions, precisely because of industry objections to the benefit-sharing requirement. In Mexico, this new set of promises has become embroiled in historically charged struggles over sovereignties and rights. Benefit-sharing provisions recognize community rights and traditional knowledge, requiring—albeit, weakly—that they be “respected and maintained.” As such, although the CBD has provided an important entrée and negotiating platform for indigenous peoples in UN forums, including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), it has also provided more fuel for longstanding struggles by pitting “communities” and “nation-states” as potentially competing claimants.
With Mexico’s entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, such sensitive issues flared up dramatically. The day the accord took effect, the Zapatistas declared war on the Mexican government and its neoliberal “reforms,” which included the end of land reform, withdrawal of rural subsidies, and the privatization of various national resources and industries. Prospecting has pushed some fairly sensitive buttons on related questions of nationwide indigenous autonomy and rights to resources, in part, because of the political sensitivity of these issues in the wake of the Chiapas uprising. In fact, the Mexican government has pointedly shied away from drafting any binding regulatory measures on prospecting activities. Although it is a signatory nation of the CBD, draft legislation on access to genetic resources has been “in process” since 1997. Thus, although the secretariat of the environment has been approving prospecting projects and granting permits under previous protocols, Mexico has no clear-cut juridical framework for prospecting activities.
The lack of national regulation has certainly not been prohibitive. Since the early 1990s, Mexican research institutions have engaged in a wide range of bioprospecting agreements, involving very different configurations of participating agencies, institutions and local interlocutors. These agreements both raise and attempt to answer the crucial questions associated with a new multilateral commitment to benefit-sharing: how should corporations compensate for access to plants and to the knowledge about their uses? To whom, precisely, should benefits be directed—nation-states, communities, research institutes—and on what basis? What difference does it make to situate biological resources in the realm of national sovereignty versus community dominion? More specifically, questions arise about the models that have been deployed for gathering participants and would-be benefit-recipients into prospecting’s new benefit-sharing arrangements. These are not just logistical or technical questions; underlying them are broader issues concerning who stands to gain and who stands to lose under bioprospecting arrangements.
As political talks between the zapatistas and the Mexican government faltered again in 1998, a U.S. government bioprospecting program, the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) initiative, announced its second round of funding. The ICBG began in 1993 as a publicly subsidized drug discovery endeavor, with corporate partners ranging from multinationals such as American Home Products and Bristol-Myers Squibb, to small biotech concerns such as the Welsh company Molecular Nature and collaborating researchers in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. The ICBG program is an enhanced version of a longstanding project begun by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) that screened plants and microbes for cancer and HIV/AIDS drugs. In the early 1990s, the NIH added a few more dimensions and collaborators to its interest in plant-based drug discovery. It began linking these screening projects to conservation and rural economic development and to the mandates of the CBD. The goal of the ICBG program is to call on the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to generate biodiversity-derived profits, while using contractual mechanisms to redistribute some of these profits back to the “stewards” of biodiversity in the South.1
In 1998, the NIH awarded an ICBG grant to a team of ethnobiologists from the University of Georgia for a prospecting collaboration in the highlands of Chiapas. The “Maya ICBG” was designed to use Mayan folk knowledge in guiding researchers to promising plants and microbes.2 These specimens were to be screened for their commercial potential by the Welsh biotech company Molecular Nature. In exchange, the University of Georgia and the communities with whom the ethnobiologists worked would split a small percentage of the ensuing royalties from patented products; some of these royalties were to be earmarked for community development funds and to “preserve traditional knowledge.”
The Maya ICBG program barely got off the ground before it was brought to its knees by concerted opposition from a small but potent coalition of actors decrying “biopiracy” in Chiapas. A chorus of groups argued that the negotiating process for this exchange was neither ethical nor transparent, and that the conditions do not exist in Chiapas—or in Mexico, more generally—for ensuring that such exchanges transpire with anything resembling legitimacy. Under the weight of these mobilizations, which tapped into powerful local and international activists’ sensibilities towards the question of indigenous rights in Chiapas, the sponsoring bodies in Mexico and the United States withdrew their support. The Maya ICBG was canceled in November 2001.
The short-lived project in Chiapas was actually preceded in Mexico by a rather differently configured collaboration, also funded by the ICBG program. The project, “Bioactive Agents from Dryland Plants of Latin America,” coordinated by Dr. Barbara Timmermann at the University of Arizona, was funded in 1993 and involved three source countries—Argentina, Chile and Mexico. The corporate partners of the project included the U.S.-based drug company Wyeth-Ayerst and the agrochemical company American Cyanamid. The participating researchers in Mexico were based at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and were charged with collecting and sending Mexican medicinal plants directly to the University of Arizona and the participating companies. In exchange, they were to receive yearly research funds to support their collecting and initial chemical work, as well as promises of a small percentage of royalties some 10 to 20 years in the future should the companies develop a drug or pesticide based on the samples. This initiative was also designed to collect “ethnobotanical knowledge” about plant uses and to direct some portion of the benefits back to the appropriate communities.
The sponsoring agency, the NIH, had a straightforward expectation of who “comes with” the plants that its contracting researchers collect. The Latin American scientists participating in this project were supposed to sign contracts with the people who provided the plants and/or information. It seems simple enough: if you give, then you stand to gain should a drug emerge from the pipeline in the future. But for this equation to work, the NIH requires something quite complicated and elusive on the ground: a research site that contains in one neat package the plants, knowledge, people, territory and decision-making authority, all congealed in the name of the participating community.
For all of its emphasis on pegging “returns” to “inputs,” the NIH’s directives about how to identify proper participants have not always materialized as program administrators hoped or imagined. In fact, in the Latin America ICBG project, none of the researchers from the participating countries went primarily to a “community” as their first or only access point for finding plants and the people who come with them. In Argentina, researchers collected plants on large, privately held ranches. In Chile, participating researchers worked on government lands and cultivated some of their compounds in petri dishes in their labs. And, most intriguingly perhaps, the Mexican researchers used their longstanding interest and expertise in conducting ethnobotanical research in urban plant markets to craft an alternate strategy of their own for linking plants-collected to benefits-returned.
But collecting plants in urban marketplaces revealed some interesting and, in the eyes of some, unsettling, effects for a politics of benefit-sharing. Presciently anticipating the kind of complexities that might befall a bioprospecting collaboration making a bid to collect directly in “communities” with little to offer up front, lead UNAM ethnobotanist Dr. Robert Bye cobbled together a rather different strategy for linking resources-collected to benefits-offered. In the Mexican context, the scientists did not ask the people who provided them with plants and knowledge to sign off as future benefit-recipients. Urban plant vendors, I was told, were considered merely “vectors of transmission” rather than sources of knowledge—and thus, according to the Lockean economies of participation and profit animating bioprospecting agreements, did not merit royalty payments.3
One might be tempted to conclude that the market collection strategy was little more than a hedge, an evasion of responsibility to local interlocutors. But before letting this interpretation carry the day, we might consider that the UNAM ethnobotanists actively and conscientiously established benefit-sharing relations and contracts with communities and indigenous organizations, although they did so under markedly different premises than those imagined by the NIH. From the outset, and as they were collecting in urban marketplaces across northern Mexico, they met with many local groups: indigenous artisans’ collectives trying to establish “green” enterprises for their crafts; a group of traditional healers who wanted help setting up an ethnobotanical garden; an indigenous community starting an organic bean cultivation project, and numerous others. Had a drug emerged out of the pipeline on the basis of plants collected in urban markets, some of the royalties or other benefits would have ostensibly returned to these groups.
The researchers were not evading an indigenous community as a proper benefit-recipient, but rather re-engineering the logics through which these “participants” would be enrolled. Dr. Bye and his colleagues explained their reasoning to me in terms of the cosmopolitan nature of medicinal plants and knowledge about their use in Mexico, describing them as well-traveled, “hybrid” resources. Much to the NIH’s discomfort, the researchers argued it would be counterproductive to try to trace benefit-sharing claims back to one bounded community; medicinal plants, they said, do not always work that way in Mexico.
Clearly, this was not the kind of “market-mediated participation” that ICBG architects had in mind. Program administrators at the NIH found this detour around the notion of community unnerving, and argued that treating plant collection as a commodity transaction—one with no further obligations involved—“breaks the link” between people, plants and territory that the agreement was meant to both reward and encourage. Crucially, this strategy has also left NIH officials feeling politically vulnerable and exposed. In the wake of the Maya ICBG debacle, ICBG program directors insisted in 2000 and 2001 that Bye stop working in markets altogether and—counterintuitively, perhaps—urged him to begin working only with contract-signing communities.
Another strategy that made its way into the Mexican bioprospecting landscape also ran into problems. This agreement involved a microbe screening contract between UNAM’s Biotechnology Institute and the San Diego, California-based biotech company Diversa. In this 1997 deal, participating Mexican researchers agreed to provide Diversa with microbe samples from two government-protected reserves in exchange for $20,000 in access fees and technology transfers for UNAM. Officials at Mexico’s National Commission on Biodiversity (Conabio) and at UNAM’s Institute of Biotechnology hoped that working with microbes—on federally protected “public” biosphere reserves, no less—would serve as a social and political insurance policy. They hoped setting up this microbe screening contract as a strict technology transfer agreement between institutions would make irrelevant the thorny issues of community ownership and traditional knowledge. This move of cordoning “politics” or social claims off from their collection sites and objects proved less of a bulwark than anticipated.
As the project was made public in 1998, a loose coalition of journalists, Mexican NGOs and intellectuals—led in large part by economist Alejandro Nadal—began to mobilize opposition on myriad fronts. These critics sharply questioned UNAM’s legitimacy as a broker of corporate access to Mexican resources, filing a case with the office of the attorney general for environmental affairs, known as Profepa. They conceded that UNAM may be a public university and that the contract may well have been approved by several controlling federal agencies, but they argued neither of these constitute the consent or participation of the “Federation”—the nation, in its broadest juridical and conceptual sense. Moreover, they said such consent is impossible without a national law regulating access to genetic resources. Profepa ruled against the project in December 2000 and concluded that the National Ecology Institute should hold public hearings in order to establish conditions in which such contracts might proceed with some degree of regulatory and legislative legitimacy.
The trajectory of each of these three experiences is, of course, more complicated than is possible to convey in this brief summary. What’s certain, however, is that these projects are not tales about the discovery of blockbuster drugs and much-deserved windfalls for the indigenous communities that led researchers to coveted therapies. Far from it, contracts were either cancelled (the Maya ICBG in 2000), not renewed (the Latin America ICBG in 2003) or subject to a moratorium (UNAM-Diversa in 2000). No products made it into the pipeline.
How, then, might we gauge the effects of the cbd’s benefit-sharing mandate and the spate of contracts executed in its name? As I have argued elsewhere, despite its fragility and even demonstrated failures, the new politics of benefit-sharing are undeniably generative. The point is not to “redeem” bioprospecting, but rather to draw our attention to some of the ways in which these complex and arguably, at times, counterproductive attempts at ethical appropriation have transformed the politics and practice of research itself, with very material effects for indigenous communities, academic researchers, corporations and national biodiversity institutes alike.
In particular, we might note an important double movement around the question of indigenous rights, intellectual property and other forms of claims-making. On the one hand, the advent of benefit-sharing as a multilateral principle has undeniably opened the door for significant mobilization of indigenous rights in which intellectual property rights and control over biological resources have become powerful idioms in wider movements for self-determination. Despite the powerful mark left on many national and international institutions by these debates, corporate participants in these research relationships remain extremely wary of entering into the kinds of negotiations that these new property claims entail.4 As the latter two Mexican prospecting agreements discussed above suggest, a range of other idioms, mechanisms and collecting strategies are being employed to chart alternative courses. The ICBG Latin America project’s collection of plants in urban markets, considered the public domain, disconnected resource-collection from benefit-provision. The UNAM-Diversa agreement, however, tried to steer clear of people altogether by prospecting on government-protected lands. These assessments of political risk and liability on the part of prospectors themselves are leading to complex formations of more and less socially “entangled” resources.
Certainly, for the UNAM ethnobotanists, their work has always entailed navigating social relations, reciprocities and obligations. But the dimension and shape of these relationships look different now. For them, prospecting contracts are both symptoms of and potential solutions to the relatively new imperative to attach the rights of claimants to the specimens they collect. This imperative, they worry, also carries risks: accusations of biopiracy and the risk of sullying long-term relations in the field with the highly charged yet elusive promise of benefit-sharing. It is the anticipation of this kind of fallout—and the activist mobilizations accompanying them—that, for better or for worse, animate the “alternative” collecting strategies noted above. It is also here that we see the invocation by many prospecting institutions across Latin America of other idioms of inclusion couched not in terms of rights, redress or compensation, but in terms of donation, technology transfer or future-looking neoliberal tropes of “incentive-building” and “stakeholding.” The distinction matters a great deal for the presumed relation—however complicated—between communities and the resources in question.5
As researchers, activists and funding bodies—who often, of course, occupy quite different positions relative to the bioprospecting enterprise—continue their attempts to navigate the post-CBD world of takings and givings, the terrain of bioprospecting continues to shift underfoot. Fully consonant with wider trends in the world of prospecting, many prospecting initiatives are generally turning their emphasis away from medicinal plants. “Safer” and more lucrative shores seem to be in the offing. As innovations in genomics, biotechnology and bioinformatics continue to generate elastic and ever-shifting demands for a range of molecules, active compounds and gene sequences, corporations’ interest in nature remains high, preferably in the form of “less entangled” resources. One Mexican biotechnologist, no stranger to collaborations with companies herself, concisely lays out the current situation: “What companies want is a genomic database or databank, and emphasis on ex-situ holdings analogous to what happened in agriculture,” she says in reference to public and private sector germplasm banks. “They want material at their fingertips, just in case—a build-up of natural capital.”
As we might surmise from these ever-shifting assessments of more and less “viable” collecting sites, the uneven project of turning biodiversity into a resource that can “pay for itself” lays bare some of the defining contradictions of contemporary neoliberalism and its successor projects. The promises ostensibly offered by “the market” are crosscut by the powerful sense, in Latin America as elsewhere, that offers of market-mediated inclusion also contain within them the conditions for ever-greater forms of exclusion and stratification.
Notes
1. On the ICBG program, see Joshua Rosenthal, “Integrating Drug Discovery, Biodiversity Conservation, and Economic Development: Early Lessons from the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups,” in Francesca Grifo and Joshua Rosenthal (eds.), Biodiversity and Human Health (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997), pp. 281-301. Also, Joshua Rosenthal, et al., “Combining High-Risk Science with Ambitious Social and Economic Goals,” Pharmaceutical Biology, No. 37 (supplement 2000), pp. 6-21.
2. For a previous NACLA article specifically on the controversy over the ICBG Maya project, see Barbara Belejack, “Bio ‘Gold’ Rush in Chiapas on Hold,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 35, No. 5, March/April 2002.
3. Cori Hayden, When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003).
4. Michael Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003).
5. Shane Greene, “Indigenous People Incorporated?: Culture as Politics, Culture as Property in Pharmaceutical Bioprospecting,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 45, No. 2, April 2004, pp. 211-238.
About the Author
Cori Hayden teaches in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2003).
