By IANS,
New Delhi : After climate change, biopiracy is becoming the new battleground between rich and poor nations, because rich countries are opposing a legal framework for use of biological resources, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said here Monday.
In this International Year of Biodiversity, India and other developing countries are pushing for a protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) “that will provide an opportunity to biodiversity-rich countries such as India to realise benefits for its people from the use of the biodiversity”, Ramesh said.
But industrialised countries — whose drug companies have often been accused of using traditional biological resources without payment — are opposing it, and there is little chance of the protocol being finalised by the next summit of the Convention on Biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan, this October.
India is hosting the summit after that, in 2012 in New Delhi. Ramesh pointed out that this would be 20 years after the convention was signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
But with little sign of the protocol being finalised, India will have to find its own way to safeguard its traditional knowledge, especially of medicinal plants, and for that a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library has been created with over 200,000 entries already, the minister informed.
He talked about recent successes in fighting attempts by western drug firms to patent medicines based on traditional knowledge, and hoped episodes like the patenting of neem and haldi (turmeric) could be avoided.
“An important next step is to set up a People’s Register of Biodiversity, so that traditional knowledge passed down through the oral tradition can also be documented and protected,” Ramesh said. “Kerala and Karnataka have already started doing this.”