Biopiracy: Historically and Today

Biopiracy: Historically and Today

http://sites.duke.edu/amazonbiopiracy/policy-issues/

As described in the video below, biopiracy is the exploitation of biological material, or knowledge of that biological material, for external commercial profit, without appropriate compensation to the indigenous people. Both historically and today, developed countries have been exploiting the knowledge and resources of indigenous peoples’ plant products for their own monetary gains.

Biopiracy

http://www.alchemiststea.co.uk/tea-transfer-from-china-to-india.htm

One such example of biopiracy in history is the East India Company’s illicit transplant of tea from China to India.  Through the beginning of the nineteenth century, China had been the world’s top exporter of tea, perhaps its most popular native product on the market.  However, the British East India Company then decided it wanted to share in the great wealth of the tea industry, so in 1848, Robert Fortune began his journey to smuggle tea seeds from China to India.  Disguising himself as a Chinese man, Fortune stole over 20,000 tea plants and seeds and shipped them to new Indian tea plantations.  By 1890, Britain imported 90% of its tea from its Indian colony, robbing the Chinese of one of their top selling indigenous plants.

Around the same time, Britain also smuggled quinine from its native home in Brazil to British plantations in Sri Lanka, Singapore and South East Asia.  At the time, the British had a great need for quinine, the only known cure for malaria and yellow fever.  Brazilians were the only ones in the world to sell this invaluable product, found naturally in their local cinchona trees.  However, in 1860, Englishman Clements Markham smuggled cinchona seeds and distributed them throughout the British empire, taking control of world quinine production.  Thus, once again, the capitalists from the developed world dwarfed the locally-run, indigenous markets.

http://simbahayan.tripod.com/B5-biopiracy01.html

Sadly, biopiracy still pervades our world today.  In 1997, an American company, RiceTec, Inc. was granted a US patent to exclusively sell “Basmati” rice, a crop that had played a huge role in Indian and Pakistani cuisine and culture for thousands of years.  Consequently, the indigenous peoples were required by law to pay royalties to RiceTec whenever they sold their own traditional product by the name, “Basmati,” even though they and their ancestors had referred to the rice as Basmati for as long as they had produced it.  In 2001, organizations around the world rebelled, succeeding in stripping RiceTec of its undeserved patent and raising awareness around the world about the modern dangers of biopiracy.