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Bioprospecting and
biopiracy
Benjamin D. Neimark
Lancaster University, UK
History of natural products drug
discovery
Bioprospecting is dened as the collection,
research, and commercialization of biodiversity
for new medicines and other useful natural prod-
ucts (perfumes, cosmetics, agro-chemicals, and
functional foods). Although generally thought
of as a modern practice, the discovery of natural
products is part of a millennia-long quest for
medicines. Evidence of this can be observed in
ancient texts, including the Chinese Materia Med-
ica, the Vedas, or the Brahamanic of Hinduism,
and many inuential Arabic medical works
(Sneader 2005).
In Europe, imperial and colonial projects of
economic botany helped to establish global
botanical gardens where collections of valu-
able herbaria and details of their medical uses
were housed and used for new discoveries.
The reported use by Indians in Quito, Peru,
of cinchona bark (Cinchona ocinalis L.) as a
medicinal decoction for shivering and cold
spells led European scientists in the early 1700s
to adopt the use of quinine as a treatment for
malaria. Another important discovery from this
period included the ipecacuanha root (Cephaelis
ipecacuanha), which was used to treat amoebic
dysentery.
The International Encyclopedia of Geography.
Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Mike M. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.w9780470659632wbieg0587
Centuries later, drug discovery was a major
focus of the US government when seeking
treatment for wounded soldiers during World
War II. Government research immediately
began to collaborate with a number of large
pharmaceutical companies, such as Abbott,
Pzer, Merck, and Squibb, for the commer-
cial production of penicillin. The large-scale
research cooperation opened a gateway for the
US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to pro-
mote joint public/private funding for enhanced
treatment from natural products.
Bioprospecting and regulation
Contemporary bioprospecting was introduced
to the conservation and development com-
munity at the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio as a
model of sustainable development intervention.
Proponents held that the discovery of natural
drug products could provide the incentive, and
more importantly the nance, for the conser-
vation of biodiversity hotspots or ecosystems
most at risk of extinction. Two of the largest
multi-collaborative bioprospecting projects that
evolved out of this period and debuted in 1991
were the bilateral contract between Costa Rica’s
National Institute of Biodiversity (INBio) and
the large pharmaceutical rm Merck and Co.,
and the US federally funded International Coop-
erative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) program
(Neimark and Tilghman 2014).
Posed as “win–win,” these large projects
were structured in a way to enable ecient
high-quality research while allowing for the
return of commercial benets to both source-
country laboratories and local communities. On
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BIOPROSPECTING AND BIOPIRACY
the research side, bioprospecting projects were
meant to facilitate scientic and technology
transfer between global pharmaceutical rms
and source-country public and private laborato-
ries. On the conservation and development end,
international environmental organizations built
relationships with rural resource users and tra-
ditional healers in attempts to deliver sustainable
development in areas where the natural resources
and traditional knowledge were sourced.
Yet, in contrast to previous research on natural
products, which generally used targeted searches
for specic plants believed to have medicinal
qualities, these new projects boasted a much
broader geographic scope of plant collection.
In fact, bioprospectors were now spanning the
globe to ensure the delivery of bioprospecting
samples (plants, insects, and micro- and marine
organisms) in bulk quantities.
One reason for the increased scale of collect-
ing was the advanced technology now accessible
to the industry. The adoption of user-friendly
robotics and high-throughput screeners provided
researchers with opportunities to run hundreds
of thousands of samples per day against a par-
ticular disease target (i.e., cancer or HIV). Fol-
lowing this, computerized databases allowed for
immediate analysis of the laborious and multistep
process of elucidation and isolation. To take full
advantage of these technologies, however, it was
essential to collect in quantities unforeseen in the
past. Major pharmaceutical rms were lured in
with the reassurance that for meager investment
and relatively little risk they could amass desired
libraries of samples to test without leaving their
home institution.
Nevertheless, the emergence of bioprospect-
ing brought about a host of ethical concerns sur-
rounding the exploitation of source-country par-
ticipants’ knowledge and worries regarding the
ecological impacts of collection. In an attempt to
placate concerns, a regulatory framework was set
up to provide a structure for return benets back
to the countries where the material and knowl-
edge was collected.
Open for signature at the rst Rio Earth
Summit in 1992 and ratied a year later, the
Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) was
for many a signicant step forward, calling for an
equitable exchange of benets in return for the
facilitation of access to the country’s biodiversity.
Articles 1, 8(j), and 15 of the CBD were espe-
cially important in this regard. The CBD stated
that signatory countries now owned all biodi-
versity within its territorial boundaries, with the
understanding that it had to make all attempts to
facilitate access for research and/or commercial
interests. This reversed the earlier Stockholm
agreement in 1972, which stated that biodiversity
was the natural patrimony of all humankind, and
thus, a global resource (Svarstad 2005). There
was some trepidation by scientists that coun-
tries might become too overprotective of their
resources, but most agree that the CBD was a
major step forward in providing signatory coun-
tries the incentive to conserve resources through
the commercialization of their biodiversity.
In order for the CBD to work in practice,
bioprospectors and source-country governments
had to agree on Access and Benet-Sharing
agreements (ABS) −a requirement that was
nally ratied in 2010 by the Conference of
Parties at the Nagoya Protocol. Although ABSs
usually diered in structure, many shared the
same mutually agreed upon terms, including (i)
outlining how benets were to be distributed,
(ii) conrmation that details of informed consent
were g ranted prior to collection, and (iii) goals
for biodiversity conservation. Monetary and
nonmonetary benets from bioprospecting were
usually delivered in the form of milestone or
royalty payments, access or licensing fees, and
technology transfer of equipment, materials,
and/or trainings (Ten Kate and Laird 1999).
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BIOPROSPECTING AND BIOPIRACY
Due to the lengthy time necessary for discovery,
small-scale sustainable development projects
were constructed at the local level.
Biopiracy and resistance
Right from the beginning, however, the opti-
mism surrounding bioprospecting was quickly
met with well-organized resistance. Many held
that the practice was essentially biopiracy, or the
systematic theft of traditional knowledge and
nature. First coined by the Canadian activist
group Rural Advancement Foundation Interna-
tional (RAFI), biopiracy was used by the Indian
scholar-activist Vandana Shiva (1997) in her book
of the same name. The thrust of the critique coa-
lesced around whether rural inhabitants received
fair compensation for the natural resources
and associated traditional knowledge used in
the drug discovery research. The resources
and knowledge used by locals for medicinal
purposes had been discovered, it was argued,
through countless years of “trial and error.”
Many of the more vocal critiques claimed that
given the history of exploitation of the global
south leading back to precolonial times, any
form of research and/or commercialization of
biodiversity under the banner of bioprospecting
was biopiracy (ETC Group 2004). Resistance
grew to the point that the Maya- ICBG project
operating in Chiapas, Mexico, was eventually
discontinued (Rosenthal 2006), followed by
other projects operating in Peru, Nigeria, and
Indonesia, that were encountering problems due
to disagreements from participating indigenous
groups. These events sent shockwaves across the
bioprospecting community, ultimately leading
some scientists to question the ethics of the
practice and their participation within it.
Although opposition to bioprospecting
manifested from larger anti-globalization and
indigenous rights movements, many of the cri-
tiques can also be traced back to the 1970s–1980s
surrounding the collecting and commercializing
of agricultural crops for the newly emerging
biotechnology industry (Neimark and Tilgh-
man 2014). The galvanizing issue was the World
Trade Organizations’ agreements on trade related
aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS)
and the contentious debate over intellectual
property rights (IPRs). The TRIPS agreement
was meant to provide a way of facilitating patents
on discoveries of nature for life science and
agribusiness multinationals and universal IPR
standards that are enforceable through trade
protocols. The logic was that patents would
incentivize research and discovery within a glob-
alized marketplace, thereby opening the door for
ownership of novel discoveries. TRIPS essen-
tially codied the application of western IPR law
in developing countries. Yet, many argued that
this trade agreement weighed heavily in favor of
multinationals who had the nancial resources
and the political power to guarantee patents
without any recognition of the original knowl-
edge leading to the discovery, running counter
to the spirit of the CBD and, in particular, the
protection of indigenous people’s intellectual
property.
A second major critique of bioprospecting
concerned the fairness of the ABS agreements
themselves. Many began to question whether
these agreements could even be equitable, given
that they were negotiated between high-powered
lawyers representing large pharmaceutical com-
panies and rural resource users with very little
experience in negotiating such deals. One
landmark case included the ABS agreements
surrounding the Hoodia gordonii – a small cactus
that grows in desert regions of southern Africa
used by the San people to stave of hunger. The
rst license agreement was made through a sci-
entic agreement with the South African-based
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BIOPROSPECTING AND BIOPIRACY
Council for Scientic and Industrial Research
(CSIR) and a joint-venture between Pzer and
a UK-based Phytopharm. Once in place, the
agreement was challenged because it was signed
without the consent of the San. A subsequent
ABS, which included the San, was also contested
on the basis that the group did not have proper
legal representation at the signing (Wynberg
2010). The rights to commercialize the plant
were subsequently sold to the giant multinational
Unilever for the development of a functional
food using the plant, but the company eventu-
ally dropped eorts due to health and sourcing
concerns.
Another noteworthy case of drug discovery
surrounds the commercialization of the rosy
periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus). Commonly
perceived as the quintessential case study of
global biopiracy, the story of the periwinkle is
quite a bit more complicated. The periwinkle
is a pantropical plant that is generally agreed
upon by botanists to be indigenous to Mada-
gascar. Research on the periwinkle by Eli Lilly
conducted in the late 1950s focused on the use
of the plant as oral insulin for the treatment
of diabetes. This work followed published and
anecdotal accounts of its use as a bush tea to
regulate sugar levels in Caribbean and Filipino
communities. After extensive research, the
periwinkle was serendipitously found to have a
number of tiny vinca alkaloids, which were use-
ful as an anti-cancer treatment of non-Hodgkin
lymphomas and childhood leukemia. The orig-
inal source material for the research, however,
was collected from multiple sources, including
from India and Jamaica, not Madagascar (Irving
Johnson, personal communication). Lilly did,
eventually, source periwinkle from plantations in
southern Madagascar, but the country did not
receive any royalties from the sale of the drugs,
which some estimates put close to 400 million
before the expiry of the patent. The periwinkle
case leads one to question what claims Mada-
gascar can make to benets when the original
source material or medicinal knowledge leading
to the discovery was not collected on the island.
Many issues surrounding the landmark case of
hoodia and the rosy periwinkle can be attributed
to the complex political, biophysical, and geo-
graphical challenges of bioprospecting. First,
much of the biodiversity desired for drug dis-
covery are collected in tropical and subtropical
ecosystems that are very far removed from the
large-scale advanced research facilities in the
global north. The biological/technical resource
imbalance raises a number of proprietary issues
concerning the collected material and knowl-
edge. For example, one major issue surrounding
the practice is that it is extremely dicult to
trace collected material housed in botanical
repositories and laboratories years after it was
collected. As Bronwyn Parry (2004) notes, the
increasing ability to “re-mine” this material
through subcontracted rental agreements to
third parties raises questions about the account-
ability and transparency of the original scientic
agreements.
Second, the range of collected natural resources
used for commercialization sometimes spans
political borders and/or dierent communi-
ties’ customary boundaries and, as such, may
not be covered by benet-sharing protocols
or aorded protection of intellectual property
rights. Furthermore, many benet-sharing laws
are complex and outdated and source countries
have not been able to keep up with appro-
priate regulations to deal with the emergent
technologies of bioprospecting and biotechnol-
ogy. Yet, maybe the most damaging eect of
not having specic bioprospecting laws is the
inability of source-country governments to hold
bioprospectors accountable for the misappro-
priation of benets. In the end, even with laws
in place, keeping bioprespectors accountable is
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BIOPROSPECTING AND BIOPIRACY
extremely challenging for source countries due
to the largely secretive nature of drug discovery
and the lack of transparency of the research
agreements.
Finally, laws governing biodiversity programs
and associated benet-sharing agreements are
sometimes complex and dicult to under-
stand. The potential for problems thus exists
between parties who understand the terms of
the agreements and those who do not. These
misunderstandings may extend into mistrust
among government institutions and may develop
into over-strict polices causing unnecessary
restrictions even for host-country scientists to
access material for basic research. Many questions
also remain as to the real value of biogenetic
resources and traditional knowledge, which
remains dicult to calculate in economic terms
and, as such, there are gross miscalculations and
expectations as to the benets that can be gained
from bioprospecting.
Due to these complex issues coupled with the
onset of new technologies, major pharmaceu-
tical rms have, on the whole, for some time
now been moving away from bioprospecting
and shutting down their natural products divi-
sions. Instead, the industry has made a strategic
shift toward the use of libraries of computer
derived generated compounds −a process called
combinatory chemistry or “combichem.” The
advantage of combichem is that it enables
molecules to be “tailored” to t the desired
target. This method promises to shorten the
time and lessen the nancial burden in bringing
home the blockbuster drug. Many arguments in
favor of synthetic drug development notwith-
standing, the pharmaceutical industry’s output
under combinatory chemistry has not lived up to
expectations, just as the industry has not lived up
to expectations. This lack of output has caused
some in the industry to rethink the important
role that natural products may still play in drug
discovery.
In fact, to write o bioprospecting would be
to misunderstand the practice. Private biotech-
nology rms and laboratories who continue to
collect natural products have diversied their
approach. Beyond just researching drug dis-
covery, bioprospectors are putting their energy
and resources into an array of natural products,
including industrial biofuels, agrochemicals,
functional foods, cosmeceuticals, and nutraceu-
ticals. This also parallels shifts to collect natural
products from nontraditional sites, includ-
ing unexplored extreme environments (called
extremophiles), or plant, animal, or microor-
ganisms that thrive in extreme biophysical or
geochemical environments, such as deep-ocean
thermal vents or alkaline and saline pools.
Another major trend in the industry comprises
developing technologies of synthetic biology
and biomimicry, and the emerging work on
re-engineering life forms using models based on
nature. Recent discoveries of the rst synthetic
genome mapping may actually revive some pro-
grams which use natural compounds as a model
precursor for new drug discoveries. As syn-
thetic biology and biomimicry research expand,
however, a new wave of social resistance seems
to be growing as well. Although many of the
environments, practices, technologies, and laws
have transformed the practice of bioprospecting
over the years, resistance remains strong and the
schism remains between practice and critics’ calls
for more distributive and procedural justice.
SEE ALSO: Biodiversity; Biotechnology;
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Environment and law; Environmental policy;
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Ethnobotany; Green capitalism; Indigenous
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technical knowledge; Natural resources; Nature
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conservation; Neoliberalism and the
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environment; Political ecology
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References
ETC Group. 2004. “From Global Enclosure to
Self-enclosure: Ten Years After – a Critique
of the CBD and the ‘Bonn Guidelines’ on
Access and Benet-Sharing (ABS).” Commu-
niqué, 83, January/February, Ottawa. http://
www.etcgroup.org/content/global-enclosure-
self-enclosure-ten-years-after- critique-cbd-and-
bonn-guidelines-access-and (accessed March 1,
2008).
Neimark, Benjamin, and Laura Tilghman. 2014.
“Bioprospecting a Biodiversity Hotspot:The Polit-
ical Economy of Natural Products Drug Discovery
for Conservation Goals in Madagascar.” In Con-
servation and Environmental Management in Mada-
gascar, edited by Ivan Scales, 296–323. London:
Routledge.
Parry, Bronwyn. 2004. Trading the Genome.New
York: Columbia University Press.
Rosenthal, Joshua P. 2006. “Politics, Culture, and
Governance in the Development of Prior Informed
Consent in Indigenous Communities.” Current
Anthropology, 47(1): 119–142.
Shiva, Vandana. 1997. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature
and Knowledge. Boston: South End Press.
Sneader, Walter. 2005. Drug Discovery: A History.
Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.
Svarstad, Hanne. 2005. “A Global Political Ecology
of Bioprospecting.” In Political Ecology across Spaces,
Scales, and Social Groups, edited by Susan Paulson
and Lisa Gezon, 239–256. New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press.
Ten Kate, Kerry, and Sarah A. Laird. 1999. The Com-
mercial Use of Biodiversity:Access to Genetic
Resources and Benet-Sharing. London: Earth-
scan.
Wynberg, Rachel. 2010. “Hot Air over Hoodia.”
Grain, October 13. http://www.grain.org/article/
entries/4047-hot-air-over-hoodia (accessed
December 9, 2013).
Further reading
McAfee, K. 1999. “Selling Nature to Save It? Biodi-
versity and Green Developmentalism.” Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, 17(2): 133–154.
Neimark, Benjamin. 2012. “Green Grabbing at the
‘Pharm’ Gate: Overcoming the Barriers of Rosy
Periwinkle Production in Southern Madagascar.”
Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(2): 423–445.
Neimark, Benjamin. 2012. “Industrial Heartlands of
Nature: The Political Economy of Bioprospecting
in Madagascar.” Geoforum, 45(5): 580–590.
Voeks, Robert. A. 2004. “Disturbance Pharma-
copoeias: Medicine and Myth from the Humid
Tro pic s . ” Annals of the Association of American Geog-
raphers, 94(4): 868–888.
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Please note that the abstract and keywords will not be included in the printed book, but
are required for the online presentation of this book which will be published on Wiley
Online Library (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/). If the abstract and keywords are not
present below, please take this opportunity to add them now.
The abstract should be a short paragraph of between 150– 200 words in length and there
should be 5 to 10 keywords
Abstract: Since its introduction at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, bioprospecting (drug discovery
from nature) has been heralded by the conservation community as a model for achieving sustainable
development in areas of high biodiversity. Yet, bioprospecting was continually confronted by critics
who deemed it nothing less than biopiracy, or the misappropriation of traditional knowledge and
nature. This critique eventually transformed the practice in many ways, including how scientists were
able to access and share benets from commercialization. Even today, as bioprospectors try to reinvent
themselves through new technologies and scientic approaches, resistance to the commercialization
of nature and knowledge remains deeply entrenched.
Keywords: biopiracy; bioprospecting; market-based conservation; sustainable development
