Geographic indications to the rescue of agrobiodiversity.
Can you help this person?
This just in:
Hello,
I am Regis Lemberthe, student at the Design Academy Eindhoven, Netherlands. I am working, in the frame of my thesis in humanitarian design, on the issue of registering Traditional Knowledge of the Use of Plants as an answer to biopiracy.
I know that some organizations already lead such activities, and I would like to get involved in those in order to make my research more relevant. I want to address two issues that I consider primordial :
How to protect traditional knowledge, regarding the efficiency of registration, and how it could be improved – everything can be improved at some point.
How to promote traditional knowledge, regarding the opportunity to raise public awareness towards this issue in consuming societies.Of course I am aware that all the problematic doesn’t fit in those two points; challenging this simple vision I have is another reason I want to join practical registering activities.
I would like to know if there are such initiatives being planned on your side that I could join, either as an external observer or, ideally, as part of a working team. Of course I am able to pay for my own expenses.
I hope you will be interested in supporting my research, as I believe design activities – products but also communication or interfaces – can contribute to some extent to improve existing situations.
I remain at your disposition for further information about my project; you can already find some of my materials on the weblog.
For more information about my course, you can visit the website of the school, section “Master” then “Man and Humanity”.
Warm regards,
Regis Lemberthe
Sorry Regis. We can’t actually help directly, except by publishing this letter, because we don’t actually have any initiatives planned in the context of this blog. However, maybe someone else who is reading this can help. There certainly seem to be a lot of people out there who believe that registering traditional knowledge can protect against biopiracy.
The website looks interesting; let us know if anything happens.
Defining basmati
So what is basmati anyway? Indian boffins all too available for comment.
Some people don’t want to register their traditional knowledge
The ingratitude! Apparently villagers in the Uttar Kannada district of the Western Ghats in India have not been entirely truthful with the folks collecting information for the local Biodiversity Register. These registers have been promoted as a way of collecting local traditional knoweldge in order to protect against biopiracy and give local people some sort of intellectual property rights. But, like jealous cooks at a bake-off, some seem to withholding information.
“People have not given details of prescriptions, compositions and the methods used to cure ailments the traditional way using plants with medicinal properties. The information we have might be incomplete. In some cases, people have just mentioned plants but haven’t revealed how they use them for treatment.â€
That’s according to G M Bhatt, president of the Biodiversity Management Committee of Heggarni. Villagers say they fear that they will lose control of their knowledge and their resources, even if it is “protected” in a biodiversity register.
They may have a point. According to the report, when it was discovered that a local plant, Malabar tamarind (Garcinia gummigutta), contained a compound that could “cure obesity” it was rapidly overharvested and is now in short supply. (That could well be true; the GEF Small Grants Programme funds a project on the conservation and domestication of G. gummigutta.)
What I wonder is, where did villagers ever get the idea that their local resources might be open to overexploitation?
Melaku Worede says Africa must protect plant genetic resources
“I get very worried when new technologies are developed and oriented towards exploiting the African farmers. It’s wrong for big agro-multinationals to force African farmers to use new seed varieties which will disempower them and lead to dependency when local varieties suitable to local conditions can be enhanced.
“I get very concerned when European plant genetic researchers use African farmers as guinea pigs. What they cannot do in Europe they do it here in Africa,” said Dr. Melaku, renowned for his pioneering work in plant genetic research and his role in restoring Ethiopia’s food security and plant resources.
This is from a long interview with Melaku Worede in Black Star News. I wonder how accurate the interview is. Doesn’t sound much like the champion of plant genetic resources of old.