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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Legally bound

New Delhi has done well to declare its intention to play a proactive role at the forthcoming Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at Nagoya (Japan) in October for thrashing out a legally binding pact on access to and benefit-sharing of biological resources. Being one of the world’s 12 mega biodiversity centres, India has substantial stakes in both preserving the biodiversity and capitalising on its commercial potential. Though the CBD, signed under the aegis of the United Nations in 1992, provides for equitable sharing of benefits from the use of genetic resources and related knowledge, there are no legally binding rules to enforce these provisions. The Bonn convention, adopted by the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD in 2002, lays down guidelines on access to genetic resources and fair and equitable sharing of benefits but these are not mandatory rules and remain only on paper. The inordinate delay in adopting a mandatory global accord is leading to unfair and indiscriminate exploitation of the earth’s genetic resource pool created through evolutionary processes over billions of years. So is the case with traditional knowledge acquired by communities about the gainful uses of these resources. A large number of flora and fauna species have gone extinct, resulting in innumerable useful genes being lost for good. It is, therefore, necessary that the proposed binding global protocol on access to and benefit-sharing of biological diversity, as distinct from the CBD, is put in place without further delay.

However, this task is unlikely to be easy. While India and most other developing countries are in favour of such a binding pact on this vital issue, the developed countries, which are the major beneficiaries of lack of such an accord, are vehemently opposed to it. Bringing about a convergence of such diametrically opposite stands will require intense negotiations before and during the Nagoya meet. Besides, the commercial interests are too formidable to allow building of consensus with ease. The new intellectual property regime, biased primarily towards trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs), as also the multinational seeds and pharmaceutical companies that tap biodiversity and traditional knowledge for new genes and drugs, tend to view this issue more from western intellectual property norms rather than the need for conservation of these resources. The diversity-rich developing countries are their main target for sourcing the desired gene and drug molecules. India has been a major victim of bio-piracy, having had to fight costly legal battles abroad to safeguard its sovereign rights over products like haldi (turmeric), neem (Azadirachta indica), basmati rice and the like. Going by official reckoning, some 2,000 patents related to Indian systems of medicine are granted every year in the US, Europe and elsewhere. It is only in the past decade that India has tried to put in place an internal regime to protect its bio-resources and conventional wisdom. Apart from enacting the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, the National Biodiversity Authority and the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library have been set up for this purpose. Moreover, national bureaus (read gene banks) have also been created to preserve genetic resources relating to plants, animals, fish, insects and microbes. However, national action alone is limiting in the absence of a binding global pact.