Biopiracy

Biopiracy is the unauthorized appropriation of the knowledge and genetic resources of farming and indigenous communities by individuals or institutions seeking exclusive monopoly control through patents or other intellectual property rights. It is distinguished from ordinary bioprospecting, the exploration of natural resources for undiscovered compounds with medicinal value, by what happens after a discovery proves commercially successful: companies seek intellectual property protection over indigenous medicinal plants, seeds, genetic resources and traditional medicines without fairly compensating the communities whose knowledge and land produced them, and the resulting patents can prohibit the very communities that developed the knowledge from using or selling the resource themselves. The practice is commercially significant because natural products underlie a large share of modern medicine, with nearly one third of all small-molecule drugs approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration between 1981 and 2014 derived from natural products; UNESCO has documented cases such as the medicinal traditions of Peru's Kallawaya communities, which lack legal protection against pharmaceutical companies seeking to patent derivative compounds.