Brazil Wants Cut of Biotech Firms' Jungle Plunder
5/14/99
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Brazil Wants Cut of Biotech Firms' Jungle Plunder
Source: The Tribune Company
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: July 6, 1999
Byline: Laurie Goering
The rainy season has ended, and the cappuccino-colored Amazon River
is at its height, flooding deep into the Amazon rain forest.
From an outboard canoe, tourists can brush past huge silver kapok
trees, red-flowering bromeliads and a thousand species of winding
vines, flicking away ants and craning to watch squirrel monkeys
scamper in the branches overhead.
Lately, however, boatmen plying the Amazon basin report ferrying a
different type of visitor deep into the rain forest: biopirates.
They come with small steel suitcases and tweezers and they stop amid
the flooded forest to harvest leaves or beetles or bits of bark,
noting the location with hand-held satellite-positioning devices,
boatmen report.
Brazilian officials fear the material is smuggled out of Brazil to
become the raw genetic fuel for U.S., European and Asian
pharmaceutical industries seeking cures for AIDS, cancer and a host
of age-old ills.
The goal might be noble, but what is vanishing over the borders with
the plants is Amazonia's chance to benefit from its resources, its
main hope for the future, Brazilians say. That is the only thing that
will ultimately save the rain forest, the world's last great
repository of biodiversity, experts believe.
In short, Brazil wants a share of the profits as the supplier of raw
materials to the biotech industry.
"One fungus, one plant or insect could produce a product worth
millions or billions of dollars. That is sustainable development for
the Amazon," said Marina da Silva, a Brazilian senator from the
Amazon state of Acre.
"But if these plants are taken out with no control and no social
return, the locals have to find other ways to survive, such as
cutting wood. What we're saying is that companies need to return a
share of the money. If they only take the resources without giving
anything back, soon there won't be anything left to take."
With fears of biopiracy -- the illegal collection of forest materials
for economic gain -- at an all-time high in the Amazon, Brazil is
poised to adopt new controls as the world's bio-engineering companies
race to patent and profit from Amazonia's diversity.
A California company already has patented the active ingredient in
the forest vine ayahuasca, which indigenous Brazilians use to brew an
ancient purgative and hallucinogenic drink used in religious
ceremonies. Furious Indians charge that this is tantamount to them
patenting the Roman Catholic host.
University of Cincinnati researchers have patented the use of
guarana, a popular Brazilian stimulant, for relieving blood clots. A
British researcher has filed for rights on bibiri tree seeds, used as
a natural oral contraceptive by Brazilian Wapixana Indians. Japanese
pharmaceutical companies have patented the active ingredients in
espinheira santa, a longtime Amazon anti-inflammatory agent, and
Brazilian ginseng, believed useful against tumors.
Some of the plant samples used in research have Come from botanical
gardens in the United States and elsewhere. Some are synthesized,
cloned and sold on the Internet. Others are simply bought from
medicinal plant shops in Brazil or from the growing number of
biopirates, Brazilian officials charge.
"They're taking everything you can imagine," said Charles Clement, a
senior researcher at Brazil's National Institute for Amazon Research
in Manaus. Even blood collected by scientists from Amazon Indians is
being marketed on the Internet.
Brazil is moving to stem the flow. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio,
150 countries signed a biodiversity convention that says nations that
serve as repositories for biodiversity should be rewarded for the use
of their resources by getting a share of profits.
Brazil is trying to turn the convention into law. Under a bill passed
by the Senate and now under discussion in the lower Chamber of
Deputies, anyone taking genes or indigenous knowledge from Brazil
would need permits and be required to sign an agreement with the
local community specifying financial return.
The law, written by Sen. da Silva and already in effect in her home
state of Acre, is widely expected to be approved nationally in
November and would be the first of its kind in Latin America.
South America's Andean nations -- Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia
-- in 1996 signed a similar Cartagena pact that establishes state
ownership of natural genetic resources and suggests a fee system and
royalty-sharing process for foreigners seeking access to the forest.
Since the pact was signed, only one company, Washington-based Andes
Pharmaceuticals, has filed a formal request to bioprospect in
Colombia. The request was rejected recently on the ground that the
economic aims of the work were unclear, a Colombian Environmental
Ministry official said.
The law in Brazil's Acre state, by contrast, already has been used to
imprison an Austrian-born man who studied indigenous plant uses among
the Kaxinawas Indians and then set up a nursery of medicinal plants
to export to pharmaceutical companies, all without compensation to
the Kaxinawas.
U.S. trade officials say Brazil's proposed regulations violate
international patent law, which recognizes inventions and
domesticated plant breeds but not what Brazil says is a nation's
right to its genetic property.
The United States, which views genes as an internationally owned
"patrimony of humanity," is one of the few nations that has refused
to sign the biodiversity treaty, fearing it would weaken patent
protection for U.S. biotech companies and slow research into new
cures.
"That anybody thinks they should get a share of the profits because
they happen to be squatting on the forest where the resources are is
laughable," one U.S. trade official said. Intellectual property
rights are reserved for inventions, not nature itself, he said.
Critics in turn charge that patent laws are designed primarily to
protect the products of wealthy developed nations. The U.S., rich in
biotech businesses capable of turning raw biodiversity into products
but poor in biodiversity itself, needs Amazonia's genes. It insists,
however, on a right to do that without charge even as it rails
against other nations for pirating its videos, music and medicines,
critics say.
The only difference, Clement charges, is that "in this case it's
other people being pirated."
Biopiracy is not a recent problem in Brazil. At the turn of the
century the country was the victim of one of the most damaging
incidents of biopiracy in history when industrial spies smuggled out
rubber tree seeds, setting up plantations in Malaysia that ultimately
destroyed the Amazon's once prosperous rubber-based economy.
That painful history laid the foundation for Brazil's proposed new
law and explains the country's intense antipathy toward the
uncompensated use of its plants.
"We have a very big frontier, and it's nearly impossible to have all
the people entering and leaving Brazil open their bags. Some of these
materials are very small and can be hidden inside pens and small
boxes," said Ione Egler, an environmental scientist in the Brazilian
Ministry of Science and Technology. With the proposed law, "what we
have in mind is to diminish the effects of this piracy."
Brazil also intends to launch a research center into active
ingredients in rain-forest plants and animals, with hopes of selling
its patented enzymes to multinational and national pharmaceutical
companies.
One of the most troubling aspects of the new fight over biopiracy is
its potential for disrupting scientific research. Recently, in a
widely circulated master's thesis, even the Smithsonian Institution
was charged with biopiracy for its role in collecting scientific
samples in Brazilian forest fragments. The Missouri Botanical Gardens
and other top research institutions have faced similar charges.
"That's total baloney," said Thomas Lovejoy, a noted conservationist
and researcher at the Smithsonian. "In this day and age there is not
a single scientific institution of any stature in the world that
would condone real biopiracy. If somebody was doing that at the
Smithsonian, they'd be fired and out the door in 30 seconds."
One solution to the current biopiracy standoff between developed and
developing countries may be voluntary profit-sharing programs,
already under way in several countries.
New Jersey pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., for instance, has signed
a bioprospecting contract in Costa Rica with the INBio, the country's
national institute for biodiversity. Under the deal, INBio is
conducting a biological survey of the country's plants for Merck,
and if the company ends up with a commercial product, it will pay
royalties.
Bristol-Myers Squibb, working through Washington-based Conservation
International, has a similar deal in Suriname.
Perhaps the best example of payment for biodiversity, however, comes
from Shaman Pharmaceuticals, a California-based company that uses
indigenous knowledge of plants to create drugs and diet supplements.
The company, which has been bioprospecting since 1991 in Peru and
other countries around the world, gets permission from local
communities first, allots 15 percent to 20 percent of its research
expedition budget to local projects, and invites local scientists to
share in the work at its labs to improve their training.
The company also has set up a non-profit association, the Healing
Forest Conservancy, to distribute a share of its eventual profits to
the host country and to community groups in the countries where it
works.
So far the company has not brought a product to market. A promising
anti-diarrhea drug for HIV patients isolated from the Peruvian
dragon's blood tree is in final FDA trials, and the financially
strapped company recently shifted its focus to diet supplements.
Beto Borges, manager of Shaman's sustainable harvesting, ethnobotany
and conservation department, remains convinced the company is on the
right track and will have no problem with Brazil's proposed new law.
"We're doing this out of common sense, out of good professional
ethics and out of scientific-based data about what's necessary to
implement ecological sustainability," he said. "Everybody should be
doing the same."