Module I: The Business of Biodiversity

Biodiversity plays an important economic, social, and cultural role in the lives of many people, particularly indigenous and local communities. Preserving biodiversity in the face of a variety of well-documented encroachments is more than an aesthetic or strictly environmental concern; biodiversity is also a business. Agriculture, pharmaceuticals, forestry, fisheries, and tourism are all key areas that are heavily dependent upon biodiversity, attracting the attention of industry researchers and investors. Management of biological resources has a profound effect, for better or worse, on biodiversity and the ecological services that sustain life. Habitat destruction as a result of competing human needs has resulted in the loss of numerous plant and animal species, some known and others unknown. However, commercial interests can also play a role in preserving biodiversity.

The growing interaction and interdependence between local cultures and modern science in the sphere of biodiversity conservation and utilization raise both ethical and commercial questions. The pertinent issues are embodied in both the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), which seeks to conserve biodiversity and protect community rights, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (known as the TRIPS agreement), which emphasizes private property rights over community rights. There are substantive conflicts between the goals of TRIPS and those of the CBD (see Table 1), reflecting the lack of international consensus on these difficult questions of rights and equity.

There are few laws and regulations in force at present that have been explicitly enacted to govern access to genetic resources or to clarify the questions related to private versus community rights. Most countries face significant new challenges regarding administrative competencies and jurisdictions for regulating access to genetic resources, particularly given the partially conflicting directives of the major international treaties. Although CBD predates TRIPS, it is not clear which treaty takes precedence when conflicts occur; TRIPS has enforcement and penalty provisions, CBD does not, but both treaties have equal nominal authority. Thus the dearth of legal, institutional, and scientific capacity to deal with these complex biodiversity, trade, and property rights issues is exacerbated by the lack of clarity within the international policy framework.

In addition to sustainable utilization for conservation purposes, biodiversity management affects economic development, food security, and stakeholder issues such as access and property rights and the equitable sharing of benefits. In many cases the various issues and approaches have not been sufficiently articulated or integrated within countries, and government officials are poorly informed to set appropriate policies. The authoritative scope of different agencies and departments with regard to these issues is unclear, and adequate modalities for cooperation and coordination among agencies often do not exist. To make matters worse, a "turf mentality" is commonly exhibited by agencies, which compete with each other for power and resources more often than they seek ways to share them. The end result is a good deal of confusion about the issues and contradiction among policies.

Stakeholders include providers of biological resources, such as states and local communities, users of the resources, including scientific institutions, private sector firms, and again local communities, and other parties, such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and keepers of ex situ genetic resource collections for conservation and research. The fundamental challenge of biodiversity management is to involve all these stakeholders in the policy process and to balance their needs and share benefits and responsibilities equitably.

A great deal of discussion, at the GBDI/IITA Training Course as well as in this field in general, focused on the issue of community rights in the context of increasing commercial interest in the biological resources of the developing world. Course faculty emphasized that any technical discussion on the protection of local community rights must:

• avoid being paternalistic in approach;
• consider first what is to be protected and why, e.g., the nature of the material and its ownership, who will protect it, and against whom protection will be enforced;
• ensure continuous dialogue with and genuine participation by communities; and
• facilitate increased awareness of the available mechanisms that current IPR systems may offer and possible new ways for the enhancement of such protection without compromising the core objectives of the CBD.

Of critical importance is the need for coordination and a regional approach, as there is strength in numbers; a united front for West Africa decreases the chances of anybody circumventing policies intended to benefit the countries of the region. Some general policy objections highlighted in Module I include:

• Options must not become closed and finite;
• Domestic capacities to assimilate transferred technology should be increased while also encouraging domestic innovative capacities;
• Acceptable sustainable solutions must be designed to respond to regional, national, and local conditions and involve full participation of all relevant stakeholders, including communities;
• The lure of protectionism should be balanced against the real needs for economic and technological improvement of local communities and developing countries as a whole.