You don’t have to pay a royalty for gazing at the moon. But, if it is an outcome of human effort, an individual’s creativity and imagination, or tradition, or collective memory of a people, it is fair to pay for using or sharing that knowledge.
The ongoing 11th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Hyderabad, under a United Nations Environment Programme, has initiated efforts to look at ways in which ABS or ‘access and benefit sharing’ can be fruitful for both the giver and the receiver of traditional knowledge.
Unfortunately, host nation India is going for it totally unprepared on ABS. The National Biodiversity Act (NBA), which is supposed to deal with traditional knowledge, is a decade old now.
Last week, the Cabinet approved the ratification of the Nagoya protocol, the international agreement signed in 2010 on ABS of genetic resources. That is a sign the government might move a little further in Hyderabad, where global participants would be negotiating for an agreement on a global methodology to achieve a fair and equitable way of ABS. But, though India has agreed to ratify the protocol, it is still not ready with its rules specifying a method for ABS. New rules for ABS would help multinational companies to share their profits with communities which had not only provided the genetic resource, but also have made available the traditional knowledge associated with its use.
The ministry of environment and forests had in 2009 worked with some civil society organisations towards drafting a framework for this. It was to be made part of the existing NBA. However, the ministry has since abandoned the draft that was prepared and is going to the convention empty-handed.
Devinder Sharma, one of the participants in the deliberations that led to the drafting of those rules, says it would have brought clarity on what should be the method in which the community benefits from anyone who wants the genetic resource. He says the government could have used the framework at least as a starting point.
It is not that the genetic resources are not being shared now. Under the existing NBA itself, 100 ABS agreements have been signed. But the worth of these agreements can be judged only by the beneficiaries or victims of these agreements, of sharing or appropriation, as the case might be.
According to activist Kanchi Kohli, who has been demanding for a system for ABS, the agreements should specify not only the benefits to the community, but also the circumstances under which they can be asked to share their resources. It would be otherwise as good as plunder, she says.
Lawyer and activist Shalini Bhutani sees some of the ABS agreements as examples of bio-piracy . She has been asking for a regime that ensures zero exploitation and a relationship of partnership between the sourcer and the giver.
The case of a company that bought out the seaweed cultivation by a community in coastal Tamil Nadu is one of the 100 ABS pacts in existence. In this case, the rights were bought from PepsiCo, which was supervising the cultivation as part of a social initiative. As much as Rs 37 lakh was paid by the companies to the National Biodiversity Authority as compensation for sharing resources.
As for what the community got, NBA has no answers.
The Convention of the Parties, which aims to take the member countries a step forward from the Nagoya Protocol, would be expected to provide answers for it. And, to the question as to whether or not every resource should be shared if a compensation is paid.
