Drug industry covets Amazon's plant life

SAO PAULO - In 1999, a Brazilian botanist, Eliana Rodrigues, undertook an ambitious project with Krao Indians to collect and identify 400 tropical plants and berries they use as medicine.

Proud of being socially conscious, she and her research partner signed agreements with three villages to share royalties from all products and patents developed from the research.

To help the tribal economy near the Amazon rainforest, they agreed to pay the Indians to cultivate some plants.

But an employee at the federal Indian affairs agency accused them of biological piracy and got a court to halt the project.

Seven years later, they are still stuck in legal limbo, waiting for Brazil's Government to pass laws giving scientists access to plants on Indian reservations and in national forests, and defining how researchers should share any profits with poor communities.

People who oppose research on Indian lands, many of them in the Government, fear scientists will hand over findings to foreign drug companies, allowing them to make huge profits from unique local cultures in the Amazon. Indians, meanwhile, resent the paternalistic nature of the state that obstructs their wishes to collaborate with researchers.

Even when companies risk the uncertain legal environment and cobble together benefit-sharing plans with poor communities, they are often caught in ethical dilemmas.

Natura Cosmeticos SA , a company that makes beauty products based on tropical plants, relies on rainforest communities to help it to develop new extracts and pays them for their help.

Paying locals can ruin cultures and cause social and economic imbalances.

Brazil has signed international agreements to protect biodiversity and has turned parts of those agreements into domestic law, but like other countries rich in biological wonders, such as many in Africa, it has yet to decide how to deal with bio-piracy.

As local laws lag, patents that raise biopiracy issues are starting to be dealt with by the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organisation.

Many Brazilians think it is strange that Japanese companies have tried patenting common names for two edible Amazonian fruits, Cupuacu and Acai, to sell abroad.

"Biopiracy is happening and companies who want to do research don't know what the rules of the game are," said Angela Kong, a Sao Paulo lawyer.

For a developing country like Brazil, murky laws are holding back a type of economic development that is far less damaging to the Amazon than activities like logging, poaching and mining.


Biopiracy

* Brazil is estimated to have 60,000 plant species - 22 per cent of the world's total - but less than half are defined in textbooks.
* The plants are a potentially lucrative source of medicines for big drug companies. They also can be taken without payment to local peoples in what is called biopiracy - the theft of indigenous plants for commercial ends.

- REUTERS