Molly Gambardella
25 June 2021
“Biopiracy”, Annotations
P. 2 TRIPs - Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (made by corporations, see P. 81)
P. 4 “Economic Espionage Act of 1996, which became law on September 17 and empowered intelligence agencies to investigate the ordinary activities of people worldwide.The act considers the intellectual property rights of US corporations as vital to national security.”
P. 5 biodiversity is being defined as nature - the cultural and intellectual contributions of non-western knowledge systems are being systematically erased.
P. 5 GATT (general agreement on tariffs and trade) treaty - patents on life forms, indigenous knowledge and by genetic engineering are grounded in processes that can be summarized and symbolized as the second coming of columbus.
P. 5 The struggle to conserve both cultural and biological diversity
P. 8 “Recognition of diverse traditions of creativity is an essential component of keeping diverse knowledge systems alive.”
P. 10 Profits and capital accumulation are the only ends of creativity; the social good is longer recognized -- IPR
P. 10 IPR or Intellectual property rights becomes another name for intellectual theft and biopiracy.
P. 11 Robert Sherwood quote - creativity as a resource, intellectual property protection tool which releases resources. (ew)
P. 11 The economic inequality between the affluent industrialized countries and the poor third world ones is a product of 500 years of colonialism and the continued maintenance and creation of mechanisms for draining wealth out of the third world. According to UNdevelopment program, while $50 billion flows from north to south in terms of aid, the south loses $500 billion annually in interest payments on debts and from the loss of fair prices for commodities due to unequal terms of trade -- western people blame lack of creativity which in turn is seen as lack in IPR protection (face palm)
P. 13 this negates the scientific creativity of those not spurred by the search for profits. It negates the creativity of traditional societies and the modern scientific community in which the free exchange of ideas is the very condition for creativity, not its antithesis.”
Oligopoly: An oligopoly is a market form wherein a market or industry is dominated by a small group of large sellers. Oligopolies can result from various forms of collusion that reduce market competition which then leads to higher prices for consumers and lower wages for the employees of oligopolies.
P. 14 Patents, tool for market control -- strongest form of IPR protection
P. 15 Martin Kenny: “...to see a thing that one produced turned into a product for sale by someone over whom one has no control can leave a person feeling violated. The labor of love is converted into a plain commodity -- the work now is an item to be exchanged on the basis of its market price. Money becomes the arbiter of a scientific development’s value.”
-thoughts -- can see how this affects artists and creativity within the “art market”
P. 15 “IPRs efficient mechanism for harvesting the products of social creativity. They are an inefficient mechanism for nurturing and nourishing the tree of knowledge.”
Beautiful powerful imagery -- roots of the tree of knowledge are being starved.
P. 16 “IPRs lead to the skewing of research to targets of greater commercial interest”
P.16-17 -- earthworms!!!!!! WTF
*P. 17 “What use is our expensive technology in a sea of ignorance?”
P. 17 commercially profitable vs socially necessary
**P. 17 “As a society facing ecological problems, we need epidemiology, ecology, and evolutionary and development biology. We need experts on particular taxonomic groups, such as microbes, insects, and plants, to respond to the crisis of biodiversity erosion. The moment we ignore the useful and the necessary, and concentrate only on the profitable, we are destroying the social conditions for the creation of intellectual property.” DAMN
P. 19 1971, Chakravarty, first patent on life (US)
P. 20 According to Andrew Kimbrell (US lawyer): “The Supreme Court’s Chakravarty decision has been extended to be continued, up the chain of life. The patenting of microbes has led inexorably to the patenting of plants, and then animals.”
“Biotechnological inventions” instead of biodiversity to appear less controversial
P. 21 “The argument that the bacteriums is Chakravarty’s handiwork and not nature’s wildly exaggerates human power and displays the same hubris and ignorance of biology that have had such devastating impact on the ecology of our planet.”
P. 22 “These shifting constructions of “natural” show that science, which claims the highest levels of objectivity, is actually very subjective and opportunistic in its approach to nature.”
P. 23 “Patenting living organisms encourages two forms of violence. First, life-forms are treated as if they are mere machines, thus denying their self-organizing capacity. Second, by allowing the patenting of future generations of plants and animals, the self-reproducing capacity of living organisms is denied.”
P. 24 Reductionist science linked with commercialization of science and resulted in the domination of women and non-western peoples”
P. 24 Reductionist science came to be by funding, rewards and recognition
P. 25 Reductionist biology promoted by August Weisman -- gene or DNA over entire human as an organism
P. 27 reductionist biology happened over long time and not by accident
P. 27 Rockefeller Foundation served as a principal patron of molecular biology from the 1930s to the 1950s. The term “molecular biology” was coined in 1938 by Warren Weaver, director of Rockefeller Foundation’s Natural Science Division. (gave about 25 million dollars for molecular biology, more than one-fourth total spending for the biological sciences outside of medicine).
P. 27 Nobel peace prize given out dozen years following 1953 (DNA structure) funded by Rockefeller Foundation
P. 28 New biology originally named psychobiology was erected on the bedrock of the physical sciences in order to rigorously explain and eventually control the fundamental mechanisms governing human behavior, placing a particularly strong emphasis on heredity. Hierarchy and inequality were thus “naturalized”
P. 30 reductionism has epistemological, ethical, ecological, and socioeconomic implications. - leads to a machine view of the world and its rich diversity of life forms - makes us forget living organisms organize themselves. Robs us of our capacity for the reverence of life - without that capacity, protection of diverse species on this planet is impossible.
P. 30-31 living systems
P. 31 that freedom for diverse species and ecosystems to self organize is the basis of ecology. Ecological stability derives from the ability of species and ecosystems to adapt, evolve and respond. In fact, the more degrees of freedom available to a system, the more a system can express its self-organization. -- External control reduces the degrees of freedom a system has, thereby reducing its capacity to adapt and evolve.
P. 31 Autopoietic (geared towards self renewal, refers to itself) vs allopoietic (such as a machine, refers to a function given from outside, such as the production of a specific output) system
**P. 31 self organizing systems grow from within, shaping themselves outward, externally organized mechanical systems do not grow, they are made, put together from the outside.
P. 31 The more complex a dynamic structure is, the more endogenously (Endogenous substances and processes are those that originate from within a system such as an organism, tissue, or cell. Endogenous substances and processes contrast with exogenous ones, such as drugs, which originate from outside of the organism.) it is driven. ...self organization is the essence of health and ecological stability for living systems.
When organisms are treated like machines:
****P. 32 When an organism or a system is mechanically manipulated to improve a one-dimensional function, including the increase in one-dimensional productivity, either the organisms’s immunity decreases, and it becomes vulnerable to disease and attach by other organisms, or the organism becomes dominant in an ecosystem and displaces other species, pushing them into extinction. Ecological problems arise from applying the engineering paradigm to life. This paradigm is being deepened through genetic engineering, which will have major ecological and ethical implications.
***P. 33 The issue of intrinsic worth is intimately related to the issue of self-organization, which is also, inturn, related to healing. … when a part is injured, some cells become undifferentiated in order to make new, specialized tissues. Thus, there is a self-directed capacity for restoration. The faculty of repair is in turn, related to resilience. When organisms are treated as machines, and manipulated without recognition of their ability to self-organize, their capacity to heal and repair breaks down, and they need increasing inputs and controls to be maintained.
P. 34 genetic engineering moves genes across species by using “vectors” usually mosaic recombination of natural genetic parasites from different sources, including viruses causing cancers and other diseases in animals and plants that are tagged with one or more antibiotic resistant “marker” genes. … vector-mediated horizontal gene transfer and recombination are found to be involved in generating new pandemic strains of bacterial pathogens.
P. 35 oilseed rape plant 1994 Denmark, spread genetically engineered herbicide tolerant gene to it which spread to a weedy natural relative -- making it nearly impossible to eliminate and now spreads over large parts of the world. Created a super weed, now creating genetically engineered pests, risk of creating “super pests”
P. 36 Monsanto’s Bollgard cotton - charged farmers $79 per hectare in addition to the seed price, made $51 million in one year -- ended up not working for the farmers & placed a federal law on the seeds since Monsanto “owns” them. -- didn’t own them when it created a hazard and didn’t work
P. 37 IPRs on crop varieties that are creating ecological havoc is an unjust system of total privatization of benefits and total socialization of costs. IPRs on crops prevent the development of ecologically sound and socially just practices. Further, they force an agricultural system on people that threatens the environment and human health.
P. 37 Legally it is the fair trade treaty, the Uruguay round of GATT, that is forcing all countries to have IPRs in agriculture.
P. 38 genetic engineering as a technique - sophisticated, but as a technology for using biodiversity sustainably to meet human needs, it is clumsy. Transgenic crops reduce biodiversity by displacing diverse crops. ...also introduce new allergies, super viruses, biological pollution
P. 39 seed banks, protect indigenous seed diversity, an alternative to engineering view of life. Through work to protect intellectual commons we have tried to build an alternative to the paradigm of knowledge and life itself as private property.
P. 40 Palestinian poem, The Seed Keepers
P. 43 its devaluation of the processes of regeneration are the cause of both the ecological crisis and the crisis of sustainability
P. 44 ancient patriarchy, seed and earth metaphor - active seed and passive earth
P. 44 people were separated from nature, and the creativity involved in processes of regeneration was denied. Creativity became the monopoly of men, who were considered to be engaged in production; women were engaged in mere reproduction or recreation, which, rather than being treated as renewable production, was looked upon as nonproductive.
P. 45 the land, the forests, the rivers, the oceans, and the atmosphere have all been colonized, eroded, and polluted. Capital now has to look for new colonies to invade and exploit for its further accumulation -- the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants, and animals.
The invasion and takeover of the land as colonies was made possible through the technology of the gunboat; the invasion and takeover of the life of organisms as the new colonies is being made possible through the technology of genetic engineering.
Biotechnology, as the handmaiden of capital in the postindustrial era, makes it possible to colonize and control that which is autonomous, free, and self-regenerative. Through reductionist science, capital goes where it has never been before. The fragmentation of reductionism opens up areas for exploitation and invasion. ...the seed and women’s bodies as sites of regenerative power are, in the eyes of capitalist patriarchy, among the last colonies.
P. 46 while ancient patriarchy used the symbol of the active seed and the passive earth, capitalist patriarchy, through the new biotechnologies, reconstitutes the seed as passive, and located activity and creativity in the engineering mind.
Five hundred years ago, when land began to be colonized, the reconstitution of the earth from a living system into mere matter went hand in hand with the devaluation of the contributions of non-European culture and nature. Now, the reconstitution of the seed from a regenerative source of life into valueless raw material goes hand in hand with the devaluation of those who regenerate life through the seed - that is, the farmers and peasants of the Third World.
P. 46 sustainable cultures view earth as terra mater. Patriarchal construct of the passivity of he earth and the consequent creation of the colonial category of land as terra nullius served two purposes: denied existence and prior rights of original inhabitants, and it negated the regenerative capacity and life processes of the earth. … European men were thus able to describe their invasions as discoveries, their piracy and theft as trade, and their extermination and enslavement as a civilizing mission.
P. 46 terra nullius, lands empty of people, vacant, wasted and unused (non-European cultures seen on the same level as fauna or even wild dogs in Australia).
P. 47 rise of mechanical philosophy with emergence in scientific revolution was based on the destruction of concepts of self-regenerative, self-organizing nature, which sustained all life. … the nurturing earth image acted as a cultural constraint on the exploitation of nature. Values based on power (commercial capitalism)
Carolyn Merchant, “One does not readily slay a mother, dig her entrails, or mutilate her body”
P. 48 sustainable agriculture (soil is alive) vs green revolution (add chemicals to soil & based on the assumption that earth is inert), created soil diseases, desertification, micronutrient deficiencies
P. 48 the seed and earth mutually create conditions for each other’s regeneration and renewal. Technologies cannot provide a substitute for nature and cannot work outside of nature’s ecological processes without destroying the very basis of production, nor can markets provide the only measure of output and yield.
P. 49 nitrogen based fertilizers release nitrous oxide, one of the greenhouse gases causing global warming, into the atmosphere. Chemical fertilizers have thus contributed to the erosion of food security through the pollution of land, water, and the atmosphere.
P. 49 Processes like hybridization of seed robs the seed of its fertility and self-regenerative capabilities colonizing it through technical means and through property rights.
P. 50-51 shift from ecological processes of production through regeneration to technological processes of nonregenerative production that underlies the dispossession of farmers and the drastic reduction of biological diversity in agriculture. It is at the root of the creation of poverty and of non-sustainability in agriculture.
P. 51 possession of this technology, then, becomes the reason for ownership by corporations, and for the simultaneous dispossession and disenfranchisement of farmers.
Tervor Williams (former executive secretary of the international board for plant genetic resources), and others like him believe that the original seed has no value. Only after “considerable investment of time and money” does a seed become valuable.
Once again, all prior processes of creation are being denied and devalued by defining them as nature. Terra mater into Terra nullius
Indigenous varieties of plants are called landraces, evolved through both natural and human selection and produced and used by third world farmers worldwide are primitive cultivars.
P. 52 placing the contributions of corporate scientists over and above the intellectual contributions made by third world farmers over 10,000 years --contributions to conservation, breeding, domestication, and development of plant and animal genetic resources - is based on rank social discrimination.
P. 53 Hans Leenders, creepy quote about farmers not being able to keep seeds because corporations need the royaltys
P. 53 the farmers, who are the guardians of the germ plasm, have to be dispossessed to allow the new colonization to happen. -- HUGE impact on 3rd world agriculture
P.54 “It is argued that patent protection is essential for innovation, yet it is essential only for that innovation that garners profit for corporate business.”
P. 55 1985 Hibberd, landmark event for patenting seeds - “With this juridical framework now in place to allow seed industry to realize one of its longest held and most cherished goals: to force all farmers to buy seed every year instead of obtaining it through reproduction”.
P.55,56 Through intellectual property rights, an attempt is made to take away what belongs to nature, to farmers and to women and to term this invasion improvement and progress. Violence and plunder as instruments of wealth creation are essential to the colonization of nature and of our bodies through the new technologies. Those who are exploited become criminals, those who exploit require protection.
P.56 debt reversal, third world to usa
P. 58 Plant regeneration -> agriculture -> green revolution -> biotechnology
P. 59 “ medical specialists, falsely believing that they produce and create babies, force their knowledge on knowing mothers. They treat their own knowledge as infallible, and women’s knowledge as wild hysteria. And through their fragmented and invasive knowledge, they create a maternal-fetal conflict in which life is seen only in the fetus, and the mother is reduced to a potential criminal threatening her baby’s life.” ******* how my mom was treated in Hartford
Pro choice and pro life are both movements based on a patriarchal construction of women and reproduction. In that it was part of the transition in childbirth from women and midwives to mostly male medical practitioners.
Women's rights, linked with their regenerative capacities, have been replaced by those of doctors as producers and rich, infertile couples as consumers. Example, Mary Beth 1986 case
P. 60 Role of man as creator taken to extreme lengths, relaxin, hormone naturally found in women is being treated as an invention by three male scientists, Peter John Hud, Hugh David Nill and Geoffrey William Tregear. Creating a boundary - divides the thinking active male from the unthinking passive female and from nature.
P. 60, 61 Biotechnology carves out the boundary between nature and culture through intellectual property rights and defining womens work and farmers’ knowledge and work as nature. A natural resource akin to natural deposits ***
Production vs creation boundaries - political constructs.
P. 61 Production boundary excludes regenerative, renewable production cycles from the domain of production. Nat’l accounting systems, based on the assumption they created that if producers consume what they produce, they do not, in fact, produce at all because they fall outside of the production boundary. All women who produce for families, children and nature are thus treated as nonproductive and economically inactive.
P. 62 Creation boundary, takes contributions of women and third world peasants and tribespeople and views them as being engaged in unthinking, repetitive, biological processes. The separation of production from reproduction, the characterization of the former as economic and the latter as biological, are some of the underlying assumptions that are treated as natural even though they have been socially and politically constructed. ***************
Male artists have this assumption as being seen as “ex nihilo” - created from nothing
Nothing is formed from nothing.
The assumption that only industrial production is truly creative because it produces from nothing hides the ecological destruction that goes with it. This patriarchal creation boundary allows ecological destruction to be perceived as creation, and ecological regeneration as underlying the breakdown of ecological cycles and the crisis of sustainability. To sustain life means, above all, to regenerate life; but according to the patriarchal view, to regenerate is not to create, it is merely to repeat. -- successful artists/businesses within capitalism vs unsuccessful artists
Regeneration is not merely repetition. It involves diversity, while engineering produces uniformity. Regeneration in fact is how diversity is produced and renewed. While no industrial process takes place out of nothing, the creation myth of patriarchy is particularly unfounded in the case of biotechnologies, where life-forms are the raw material for industrial production.
P. 63 the source of patriarchal power over women and nature lies in separation and fragmentation. Nature is separated and subjugated (definition - bring under domination or control, especially by conquest.) to culture; mind is separated from and elevated above matter; female is separated from male, and identified with nature and matter. The domination over women and nature is one outcome; the disruption of cycles of regeneration is another. Disease and ecological destruction arise from this interruption of the cycles of renewal of life and health. The crises of health and ecology suggest that the assumption of man’s ability to totally engineer the world, including seeds and women’s bodies, is in question. Nature is not the essentialized, passive construct that patriarchy assumes it to be. Ecology forces us to recognize the disharmonies and harmonies in our interactions with nature. Understanding and sensing connections and relationships is the ecological imperative.
P. 63 Main contribution of the ecology movement has been the awareness that there is no separation between mind and body, human and nature. Nature consists of the relationships and connections that provide the very conditions for our life and health. This politics of connection and regeneration provides an alternative to the politics of separation and fragmentation that is causing ecological breakdown. It is a politics of solidarity with nature. This implies a radical transformation of nature and culture in such a manner that they are mutually permeating, not separate and oppositional.
P. 65-66 “tropics are the cradle of the planet’s biological diversity with a multiplicity of ecosystems beyond compare. A majority of Third World countries are located in the tropics and, thus, endowed with this wealth of biological diversity, which is being rapidly destroyed
Habitat destruction due to internationally financed megaprojects--such as the building of dams, highways, mines, and aquaculture--in areas rich in biological diversity. Blue Revolution is an example of how coastal areas rich in marine diversity and inland areas rich in agricultural diversity are being destroyed through intensive shrimp farming.
The technological and economic push to replace diversity with homogeneity in forestry, agriculture, fishery, and animal husbandry. The Green Revolution is an example of deliberate replacement of biological diversity with biological uniformity and monocultures.”
P. 66 biodiversity erosion -> chain reaction, interrelated through food webs and chains. Not just a crisis of disappearing species, which serve as industrial raw material and potential for spinning dollars for corporate enterprises. It is more basically a crisis that threatens the life-support systems and livelihoods of millions of people in Third World Countries
P. 66 “references made to global diversity and global genetic resources, biodiversity - unlike the atmosphere or the oceans -is not a global commons in the ecological sense. Biodiversity exists in specific countries and is used by specific communities. It’s global only in its emerging role as raw material for global corporations.”
P. 67 John Todd, visionary biologist, has stated, biodiversity carries the intelligence of three and a half billion years of experimentation by life-forms. Human production is viewed as coproduction and cocreativity with nature. IPR regimes in contrast, are based on the denial of creativity in nature. Yet, they usurp the creativity of emerging indigenous knowledge and the intellectual commons. Further, since IPRsare more a protection of capital investment than a recognition of creativity per se, there is a tendency for ownership of knowledge, and the processes emerging from it, to move towards areas of capital concentration and away from poor people without capital. Knowledge and resources are, therefore, systematically alienated from the original custodians and donors, becoming the monopoly of the transnational corporations. P. 68 ayurvedic knowledge, people are knowing subjects vs western medicine and pharmaceutical corporations pep[le are not knowing subjects
Non-western medical systems - do not exercise a commercial monopoly through their practice. They do not use their knowledge to amass limitless private profit and wealth. Gyan daan (in India) - the gifting of knowledge
P. 69 pp on knowledge, historical tendency
P. 70, neem as an example of indigenous knowledge being stolen through IPRs. “squeezing bucks out of the neem ought to be relatively easy” How WR Grace justified copying what people in India had been doing for 2,000 years:
“Although traditional knowledge inspired the research and development that led to these patented compositions and processes, they were considered sufficiently novel and different from the original product of nature and the traditional method of use to be patentable.”
P. 71 meta knowledge ( knowledge of principles, public domain) - the tree has biopesticidal properties vs microknowledge (knowledge involved with tinkering with technical processes. By doing this IPRs are:
Claiming nature’s creativity and the creativity of other cultures as its own.
In the case of neem, it leads to the false claim that biopesticide property was created by the patentee.
Petty tinkering becomes the source of creativity (for IPR) rather than acknowledging that specific species are the source of creation or specific properties and characteristics, and that communities are the source of the knowledge that allows that “property” to be utilized
How value and IPRs are related: if all value is seen as being associated with capital, tinkering becomes necessary to add value. Simultaneously value, is being taken away from the source (biological resources as well as indigenous knowledge) and reduced to raw material.
Value is depending on the source - not how it is processed. The same tinkering done to the neem tree, applied to another species would not produce a pesticide.
P. 72 When indigenous systems of knowledge and production interact with dominant systems of knowledge and production, it is important to anticipate whether the future options of the indigenous system of the dominant system will grow. Whose knowledge and values will shape the future options of diverse communities?
*visual metaphor P. 72 Bioprospecting, exploration of commercially valuable genetic and biochemical resources - metaphor borrowed from the prospecting for oil and gold (the world resources institute)
Metaphor suggests that prior to “prospecting”, the resource lies buried, unknown, unused, and without value. -- connection to Ariella’s book, IPR treating biodiversity as colonists treated the land inhabited by indigenous life and animals to be terra nullius aka nobody's land.
P. 73 This leads to alternative economic systems disappearing, and the western prospector is projected as the only source for medical and agricultural uses of biodiversity. The disappearance of alternatives , monopolies in the form of IPRs appear natural.
P. 73 Susan Laird quote (bioprospecting proponent) P. 74 health sector & agricultural - bioprospecting markets for patent commodities
P.74 The use of traditional knowledge increases the efficiency of pinpointing plants’ medicinal uses by more than 400%
P. 74 ex: 1992, Eli Lily paid Shaman Pharmaceuticals (major bioprospecting company), $4 million for exclusive worldwide marketing rights for all antifungal drugs drawn from the knowledge of native healers. The Shaman Pharmaceutical com[ny will return a portion to people and gov’ts in the countries where Shaman works, although the amount isn’t disclosed.
P. 75 Ex. 1991, agreement between Merck Pharmaceuticals and INBio, the national biodiversity institute of Costa Rica. Merck agreed to pay 1 million for the rights to keep and analyze plant samples gathered by INBio employees in Costa Rican national forests. This multinational corporation has $4 billion in revenue a year and exchanged only $1million to a small conservation organization for unconditional rights for prospecting. The agreement is not with the people living in or near these national forests, they had no say in this or guaranteed any benefits, agreement not with the government either, it is an agreement between a transnational corporation and a conservation group developed at the initiative of leading US conservation biologist, Dan Janzen.
P. 76 those who are selling bioprospecting rights never had the rights to biodiversity in the first place, and those whose rights are being sold and alienated through the transaction have not been consulted or given a chance to participate.
P. 76 in other cases, indigenous communities are being asked to patent their knowledge in collaboration with Western corporations. The capital, however, comes from Western institutions and the rights are immediately transferred to powerful commercial interests, who control capital and the market. *****P. 77 Patenting does not protect indigenous knowledge. Protection of knowledge implies the continued availability and access to it by future generations in their everyday practices of health care and agriculture. If the economic organization that emerges on the basis of patents displaces the indigenous lifestyles and economic systems, indigenous knowledge is not being protected as a living heritage. If we recognize that the dominant economics system is at the root of the ecological crisis because it has failed to address the ecological value of natural resources, expanding the same economic system will not protect indigenous knowledge or biodiversity.
THIS !!!!
Entire page, museum of care
P. 78 in addition, the perverse logic of financing biodiversity conservation by a small percentage of profits generated by biodiversity destruction amounts to licensing destruction, and reduces conservation to an exhibit, not a basis for living and producing.
National Park system? “Wild” zoos, not connected to each other, separated by human highways. Only available by car or plane.
P. 79 The issues of equity, fairness and compensation need to be assessed in a systemic way, both at the level of taking indigenous knowledge and at the level of later pushing it out through aggressive marketing of industrialized products in medicine and agriculture. Key questions: Is it right to displace the sources of alternative production and organization? Can such destruction be fully compensated? Can the planet. And the diverse communities that inhabit it, afford to have biodiversity and alternative lifestyles swallowed up as raw material for a centralized, global corporate culture that can only produce cultural and biological uniformity?
*p. 79, the protection and recovery of the biodiversity commons is, first and foremost, a political and social movement that recognizes the creativity intrinsic to the diversity of life-forms. It calls for common property regimes in the ownership and utilization of biodiversity. Further, it works toward an intellectual commons -- a public domain in which knowledge of biodiversity's utility is not commodified.
P. 80 first public demonstration of recovery of biodiversity, Indian farmers august 15, 1993, declared their knowledge is protected by Samuhik Gyan Sanad (collective intellectual rights). According to the farmers, any company using local knowledge or local resources without the permission of local communities is engaging in intellectual piracy, as in the case of the patents on neem.
Later developed by Third World Network (protest)
Sui generis - unique
CIRs - collective intellectual property rights
P. 81 Biodemocracy, the belief that all knowledge and production systems using biological organisms have equal validity. TRIPs agreements in contrast are based on the concept of bioimperialism, the belief that only the knowledge and production of western corporations need protection.
P. 81 TRIPS (if unchallenged) become the instrument for displacing and dispensing with the knowledge, resources, and rights of Third World peoples, especially those who depend on biodiversity for their livelihoods, and who are the original owners and innovators in the utilization of biodiversity.