Da norma à ação: conflito pelo acesso aos recursos genéticos da Amazônia (Bolívia, Brasil, Colômbia, Equador, Peru e Venezuela)

Abstract

The exploration of the natural resources of the peripheral countries by the central ones is historical. Within the current Labor International Division, this exploitation has been gaining more regulation in some countries. The countries in the Amazon basin, which are rich in genetic resources, may consider legal access to these resources in their territories, such as when a company or a researcher meets all the bureaucratic and practical requirements which are contained in the law, but the access may also be illegal, which constitutes biopiracy. The difference in this classification of land uses has been the subject of international controversy in a general context of the end of commercial barriers and in the discovering of the economic potential of natural resources previously despised by the market. This access involves relations at different scales and with different actors that participates the international geopolitical system, with regulations in regional and international agreements, and national laws. Among these actors stand out large corporations, national states and traditional populations competing unequally for control or influence over the territory. The simple way of framing and even describing a plant, for example, are enough to expose different strategies for the control and classification over the territory: such a plant could be evaluated simultaneously by its economic potential and its scientific properties, or by the risk of its disappearance and the defense of their isolation in relation to humans, or the antiquity and permanence of communitarian and empirical uses of its leaves and roots to guarantee the maintenance of the way of life of a traditional group. Within this framework, the objectives of this work are to understand the unfolding of the legal order on genetic resources in the Amazon region. We will do this work based on international agreements, national laws and publications of authors working on genetic resources in the Amazon.