Search, bioprospecting, and biodiversity conservation: Comment
نویسندگان
چکیده
To what extent can the private sector be relied upon for the protection of biological diversity? Bioprospecting, the search for valuable products such as pharmaceuticals in biological organisms, is one incentive mechanism that has received much recent attention in the literature (Polasky et al. 1993, Polasky and Solow 1995, Simpson et al. 1996, Koo and Wright 1999, Rausser and Small 2000). Simpson, Sedjo, and Reid (1996) (henceforth SSR) suggest that bioprospecting incentives are likely vanishingly small. Even the most biodiverse area of land on earth (in Western Ecuador) has an estimated marginal value of less than $21 per hectare – far too small to offset the opportunity cost of development. SSR argue that small marginal values are inevitable whether the probability of search success is high or low. Under high probability searches, the last few leads are likely redundant. Under low probability searches, any lead is unlikely to be productive. Rausser and Small (2000) (henceforth RS) present a competing model and obtain dramatically different results. Analyzing the same data SSR used to obtain a value of $21/hectare, RS calculate a value of $9,177/hectare, about a 440-fold increase (see Table 1 of RS for a side-by-side comparison of results). They conclude that “... the bioprospecting value of certain genetic resources could be large enough to support market-based conserva∗Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, UC Santa Barbara 93106. (Tel) 805-8935802, (Fax) 805-893-7612, (Email) [email protected] †Visiting researcher, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara, 93106
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Search, bioprospecting and biodiversity conservation
To what extent can private-sector bioprospecting incentives be relied upon for the protection of biological diversity? The literature contains dramatically different estimates of these incentives, from trivial to quite large. We resolve this controversy by isolating the fundamental source of the discrepancy and then providing empirically defensible estimates based on that analysis. Results demo...
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