Securing Economic Benefits and Promoting Conservation through Bioprospecting

I is widely recognized that developing countries in the tropics that harbor a large fraction of the world’s biodiversity could, in principle, obtain substantial benefits from their biodiversity. The challenge has been to harness the economic value of sustainable uses of biodiversity in order to justify the conservation of habitat in its natural state. Promising strategies for meeting this challenge include ecotourism, carbon credits obtained from intact forest, and ecosystem services, such as the provision of clean water. Here we focus on how bioprospecting, the investigation of biodiversity as a source of useful medicines or genes (ten Kate and Laird 1999), might, in practice, provide the expected benefits. The Convention on Biological Diversity (1992–1993) and more recent agreements recognize that nations have ownership of, and can control access to, species (“genetic resources”) within their boundaries; these agreements mandate equitable sharing of the benefits derived from biodiversity (Gollin 1993, 1999).A principal focus has been on the legal issues concerning bioprospecting, such as the definition of prior informed consent for the use of traditional knowledge and specification of benefit-sharing arrangements (Blaustein 2006, CBD 2006). This emphasis resulted from the many cases—some recent—of the use of biodiversity without recompense, as occurred with the insecticide from the Indian tree Azadirachta indica (neem), which has low toxicity to vertebrates, and with a heat-stable enzyme from the bacterium Thermus aquaticus, which is a key research tool. As a consequence, many governments have inhibited basic research on biodiversity (Grajal 1999, Gómez-Pompa 2004). It is very likely that biodiversity-based research carried out by pharmaceutical and agricultural companies also has been inhibited, although the extent of this inhibition is difficult to quantify. Even though bioprospecting research could promote substantial economic growth in areas with high biological diversity, such as the tropics, countries there have failed to capture the value of their biodiversity.