Lush Indian Kerala Loses Out to Bioprospecting Firms
11/18/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Lush Kerala Loses Out to Bioprospecting
Firms
Source: InterPress Service
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: November 18, 1999
Byline: By F.S. Hameed
TIRUVANATHAPURAM, India, Nov 18 (IPS) - A government-sponsored
research organisation in the biodiversity-rich southern Indian
state of Kerala is in the dock for exporting medicinal plants to
bioprospecting firms in Singapore and Denmark.
The Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute (TBGRI)
here has through a questionable agreement exported 1,000 samples
of extracts from 400 species of medicinal plants to Singapore's
Centre for Natural Products Research (CNPR).
The plants were collected from the forests in the Western
Ghats hill range, one of the 18 recognised global biodiversity
hot-spots.
About 3,700 vascular plant species have been recorded in
Kerala, the majority of which have use in Ayurveda, the
traditional herbal medicine, which is highly developed in Kerala,
meeting up to 30 percent of the health care needs.
The Singapore Centre is a Glaxo Wellcome-funded biodiversity
prospecting institution based at the Singapore National
University. The agreement with its Kerala partner allows it to
offer any commercial product developed from the Kerala plants to
a ''third party''.
Investigations revealed the ''third party'' was in fact Glaxo
Wellcome, one of the world's leading research-based
pharmaceutical companies.
The draft agreement formulated by Dr Miranda G.S. Yap,
director of the Singapore Centre had mentioned the drug
transnational as holding the first right to commercial products
resulting from the project. But that was changed in negotiations
that followed with the Indian Institute to ''third party''.
The Institute's director Dr P. Pushpangadan, a reputed
ethnopharmacologist, who was forced to resign earlier this year
and has since been reappointed the director of the government's
National Botanic Research Institute, in Lucknow, has denied the
role of Glaxo Wellcome.
He claimed that any patent arising from the project will be
equally owned by the two partners, although the contract states,
''work carried out by CNPR and Glaxo Wellcome with the samples
and any information relating thereto ... are confidential
property of CNPR or Glaxo Wellcome.''
In fact, the Kerala-based Institute, an autonomous research
organisation under the Department of Science, Technology and
Environment, does not have the mandate to export biodiversity
materials.
The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity affirms sovereign
state right over biodiversity and a draft national law bans the
export of biodiversity without prior informed consent of the
central government.
Environmental groups as well as senior scientists at TBGRI
allege that the Executive Committee of the TBGRI was not fully
informed of the details of the deal. Two mass circulation
Malayalam-language magazines in Kerala, 'Malayalam' and
'Keralasabdam' have carried cover stories exposing the deal.
The state government has become cautious after the leakage
from TBGRI. ''Any export of biodiversity now has to have the
clearance at the chief minister's level,'' an official said.
Even more worrying than the loss of biodiversity is the feared
leakage of a painstakingly built inventory of indigenous
knowledge about the medicinal use of plants.
The contract with the Singapore Centre is prefaced with a
description of a 12-year project for documenting information on
tribal medicine in India sponsored by the Department of
Biotechnology. The project, of which Pushpangadan is a
coordinator, gathered information of about 7,000 plant species.
Although the agreement was signed in October 1995, and the
plant extracts were exported to Singapore in several consignments
for the next two years, so far no useful results have been
reported to TBGRI by its Singapore partner. Scientists at TBGRI
disclosed that not only extracts but plants were also sent to
Singapore.
An agreement TBGRI has signed with the Danish development aid
agency DANIDA and the Royal Danish School of Pharmacy is equally
intriguing.
According to the agreement, DANIDA holds the right to decide
on the ownership of patents resulting from the work on medicinal
plants exported to the school.
Prof Ulf Nyman of the School, who is the Principal Responsible
Party, however, had made an offer to share the patents with
TBGRI, following widespread criticism of the agreement. But this
has no legal standing since the contract has not been amended
accordingly.
According to the 1992-94 annual report of the TBGRI, 39
species of medicinal plants were sent to Denmark. However, a
research report published in a journal lists 78 plant species
were taken to the Danish School.
An expert committee instituted by the Department of Science,
Technology and Environment in November 1997 found that no endemic
plants were exported.
But the Indian Biodiversity Forum of experts in the field has
refuted the findings. ''...Plant specimens as well as extracts
and endemic plants did indeed leave our shores for Denmark and
Singapore. Report of research work done in Denmark published in a
journal has at least four endemic species of Kerala mentioned as
having worked on,'' said a spokesman for the Forum.
The Forum has demanded that legal action be taken against
the two countries within the framework of the Biodiversity
Convention and the biomaterials retrieved.
''In the event they refuse to return the biomaterials they
must negotiate new agreements based on equity and fully taking
into account the economic value of biodiversity.''
(END/IPS/fsh/an/99)