Swindling The South

THE 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) decrees that western pharmaceutical companies, long accustomed to freeloading rich flora of tropical countries, can no longer plunder that fabulous treasure without paying a suitable price to its rightful owner. But medicine monarchs of the world have found a chink in the CBD’s armour: botanical gardens, rich repositories of biodiversity from the South.

The CBD stipulates that use of botanical garden collections acquired after 1992 must comply with the CBD’s requirements for benefit-sharing with the country of origin. Collections made prior to 1992, however, are currently exempt from these rules.

And that’s precisely the loophole drug companies are exploiting. The logic is: why should you suffer the rigmarole of negotiating with corrupt politicians in developing countries when you can pick up the plants from a botanical garden in Europe or the US? Indeed, investigations by the Rural Advancement Foundation International, a Canadian NGO, have revealed that such drug companies are now bypassing negotiating with Southern governments for access to plant species by obtaining them on better terms from botanical gardens.

According to a study by the International Association of Botanical Gardens (IABG), some 120 such gardens maintain known collections of crop species while 170 have known medicinal and forest species collections. Some notable botanical gardens being targeted by drug companies are Hawaii’s Lyon Arboretum, which boasts of several native species from South Asia and Sri Lanka, London’s Chelsea Physic, the Berlin Botanical Garden, New York Botanical Garden and Kew Garden, London.

In the most publicised case, US-based Phytera Pharmaceuticals clandestinely struck deals with eight botanical gardens in Europe after having failed to negotiate with developing countries. Says Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resources: "Phytera’s contracts are ridiculous. A royalty of $15 per sample is almost getting it free, not to speak of a meagre royalty of 0.25 to 2.5 per cent of Phytera’s proceeds to the garden if the sample is used in a new drug."

Botanical gardens, however, are willing to barter their treasure for any price amount as the world over (especially in  eastern Europe and the former USSR) they are currently facing an acute cash-crunch.

Earlier, Phytera claimed that a share of royalties would be returned to the country of the plant’s origin. But investigations by the British science magazine New Scientist reveal the contract had no such provision.

Phytera is not the lone shark eyeing the jewels of botanical gardens. The $9 billion Pfizer Pharmaceuticals in the US has launched several major bioprospecting initiatives to collect tropical plants in the North and South. One of Pfizer’s endeavours is a seemingly innocuous collaboration with the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) involving identifying specimens brought from the South. And there are many others in the fray: Glaxo, Wellcome, Merck and Shaman.

While Northern botanical gardens are within their international legal rights (the CBD is not yet legally binding and has not been signed by the US) to sell access to plants from the South held in their gardens, doing so clearly violates the spirit of the CBD. "The CBD has been aware of this discrepancy since 1993; but its continued complacency over ex situ collections allows pharmaceutical companies and other researchers to profit from South’s biodiversity while conveniently overlooking issues of national sovereignty, benefit-sharing and access provisions of CBD," says Shiva.

Botanical gardens are grand herbariums of ex situ plant biodiversity garnered over centuries. The IABG study tells us that worldwide botanical garden collections have at least one sample of as much as half the world’s vascular plants. Most acquisitions aren’t directly obtained from nature by plant collectors. Instead, botanical gardens usually depend upon exchanging germplasm between themselves (25 per cent of holdings) and buying plants from private and public sources (50 per cent of holdings).

Unfortunately, adequate information does not exist for the origin of important holdings in many botanical gardens to be documented reliably. And as botanical gardens continue to exchange germplasm freely among themselves with only sparse documentation, this problem will be further compounded.

Despite these problems, it’s clear that if the CBD does not honour its commitments, the developing world may lose more than half its commercially useful plants. The CBD must ensure therefore that the issue moves towards final resolution when the Third Conference of Parties to the CBD meets in Buenos Aires next month.