Biopiracy Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Biopiracy Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

Biopiracy is the practice whereby pharmaceutical companies or research scientists collect and remove biological specimens and related indigenous knowledge, without authorization, acknowledgment, and/or due compensation, in order to develop commercial products, such as modern medicines, for profit. The term biopiracy is highly controversial and has emerged as a critique of bioprospecting. In this highly polarized debate, cases regarding the research and development of biological resources are generally characterized in one of two ways: as bioprospecting, which is the acceptable practice of research and development of medicinal plants and believed to result in win-win scenarios for local communities and international actors; or as biopiracy, in which villains and victims are seen as perpetuating the sustained history of colonial exploitation of developing nations. One of history’s most notorious biopirates was Henry Wickham, an Englishman who smuggled 70,000 rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis) seeds from the Manuas region of Brazil in 1876. With Wickham’s seeds, British-owned rubber plantations in Asia quickly outproduced those in Brazil, resulting in the collapse of the Amazon rubber boom.

Critics of Biopiracy

The biopiracy narrative, critiquing the win-win scenarios championed by supporters of bioprospecting, draws on the solidarity of farmers, rural poor, and indigenous people, and suggests that the activities of scientists and pharmaceutical companies result in the plunder of the poor and the exploitation of their resources for economic gain.

Vandana Shiva, a vocal author and antibiopiracy activist, argues that biological resources should not be removed from the realm of public good to private property rights. In this view, all external attempts to patent biological resources are acts of piracy. For Shiva, the ability to patent life forms is seen as a classic case of bio-colonialism, in which the Western system of intellectual property rights and neoliberal economics jeopardizes the cultural rights and natural resource practices of local peoples.

A recent victory for opponents of biopiracy was won in 2005, when the European Patent Office revoked a patent based on the fungicidal properties of the neem tree (Azadirachta indica). Opponents to the patent argued that the neem tree’s fungicidal properties have been known about and used in India for centuries. This case signals to researchers that they can not equate indigenous knowledge with free and public information. For those questioning the patenting of life forms based on traditional knowledge, this case presents a clear victory in the struggle of indigenous rights against global commercial interests.

Bibliography:

Alan Hamilton, “Medicinal Plants, Conservation and Livelihoods,” Biodiversity and Conservation (v.13, 2003);
Cormac Sheridan, “EPO Neem Patent Revocation Revives Biopiracy Debate,” Nature Biotechnology (v.23/5, 2005);
Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End, 1997);
Hanne Svarstad, “A Global Political Ecology of Bioprospecting,” Political Ecology across Spaces, Scales and Social Groups (Rutgers University Press, 2005).