Sustainability or Colonialism? Legislative obstacles to research and development of natural products and patents on traditional knowledge in Brazil

Abstract

Historically, developed countries have benefited from the biodiversity and traditional knowledge of developing countries. Since the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was approved, the world-view regarding access to biological resources has changed. This change marked the introduction of legal agreements regarding access to genetic resources, traditional knowledge and benefit sharing, seeking a fair return for owners and local communities. Unfortunately, as with most national laws, these legal devices complicated collection programs and research initiatives, and diminished the emphasis on the discovery of natural products. There remains a lack of discussion on the establishment of a fair international market value for the access to genetic resources. While Brazil still has advantages and opportunities in this arena, the issue sets barriers for research and development. The protective measures are being reviewed in the project bill 7735/2014, which brings improvements, yet it is still controversial. For this short communication we consulted journals, conference proceedings, as well as scientific and journalistic magazines to report some of the disastrous consequences of the implementation of national laws regarding CBD. We suggest a new focus for decision-making policies based on more efficient field inspections, the empowerment of traditional communities and further associated research in order to ensure the claims of CBD as well as to ratify the Nagoya Protocol.

“There is no carnival without samba”: Revealing barriers hampering biodiversity-based R&D and eco-design in Brazil

“…Thus, this work contributes by adding a discussion on eco-design and for bringing evidence from the natural products sector. Second, the work extends the contribution of Pedrollo and Kinupp (2015) by suggesting that legislation aspects formulate the main challenges when dealing with biodiversity ecodesign in Brazil. A third contribution is that this work adds evidence from an emerging economy context, which has been considered a gap in the state-of-the-art literature on sustainable production and consumption (Tseng et al, 2016).…”

“…The efforts undertaken in emerging economies such as Brazil to expand their industry seeking more intense economic growth have side effects, including resource rarefaction and environmental problems (Lopes and Azevedo, 2014). Furthermore, as observed by Pedrollo and Kinupp (2015), although Brazil has some advantages in developing natural products, the country also faces a variety of challenges, such as bureaucratic obstacles and legislative delays by the public administration bodies (Pedrollo and Kinupp, 2015). In Brazil, we can understand the complexity of bio-based eco-design as "organising the carnival party" and this expression is frequently used to refer to very complex processes of everyday life, and is based on full-collaboration of a variety of stakeholders.…”

Indigenous and traditional knowledge, sustainable harvest, and the long road ahead to reach the 2020 Global Strategy for Plant Conservation objectives

“…These procedures are highlighted in International Labour Organization Convention 169, International Society for Ethnobiology Code of Ethics (ISE 2006), as well as in other conventions dealing with the rights of indigenous and local peoples (CBD 2012;Contreras et al 2015); and from another perspective, Prior Informed Consent is also supported by discussions on research with human beings as a whole. Ethical issues about access to IPLC knowledge in Brazil were discussed by Liporacci et al (2015) and Pedrollo & Kinupp (2015), showing fragilities and limitations of the procedures in operation from 2002 until 2015 under the guidelines of the provisional measure which was valid during those dates. The new regulations, framed by Law 13,123/2015, still appear to be of limited effectiveness in protecting the traditional knowledge associated with biodiversity (Moreira & Conde 2017); where access to associated traditional knowledge of identifiable origin is conditional on obtaining prior informed consent and associated traditional knowledge of non-identifiable origin (e.g., diffuse knowledge) is independent of prior informed consent .…”

Where are the Brazilian ethnobotanical studies in the Atlantic Forest and Caatinga?

“…According to Haverroth (2010), in Amazonia this scenario has also been observed and may reflect the lack of specialists in the region as well as laws that restrict access to genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge. Another factor that could be attributed to this is the time it takes to complete studies about indigenous groups, especially considering the large amount of legal bureaucracy involved and the significant amount of time needed for the researcher/indigenous person to build a working relationship, which is often incompatible with the time given to complete a master's or PhD degree (Liporacci et al 2015;Pedrollo & Kinupp 2015).…”