Biopiracy and misappropriation of genetic resources

Biopiracy.
There are no clear statistics on biopiracy and misappropriation of genetic resources, but in the last 20 years there have been several cases: for example, the yellow bean "enola" the hoodia, rooibos and nem. The fight against bio-piracy represents a major challenge facing the EU: these practices are in fact contrary to the commitments made to the eradication of poverty and the protection of biodiversity, as well as the principle of policy coherence for development as set out in the Treaty of Lisbon.

The imbalance between providers and users of genetic resources has revealed, globally, the issue of access to genetic resources and sharing of benefits they generate. In this context, the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) plays a major role and differs greatly from other treaties relating to the environment because in his system, the concepts of justice and fairness play an explicit and essential.

And the problem is not only in medicine, but also with regard to new varieties of fruits and vegetables. Current legislation encourages companies to the detriment of traditional knowledge and local communities.

The term "biopiracy" refers to the process by which indigenous cultures are denied the right to access these resources and forms of knowledge, replacing it with the prerogatives of monopoly in favor of their exploiters. The vast majority of IPR imposed on biodiversity means denial of the right of free access to the common knowledge of non-Western scientific traditions (such as neem, turmeric and jaramla or Phyl-lanthus niruri), or to those of modern Western science. Examples of this phenomenon are the patents imposed on the processes used in genetic engineering, developed with public research university in the field and then privatized through the IPR (eg, to clarify, the particle gun, the fundamental technique used to microbombardare bodies and go there to insert foreign genes).
Traditional systems of knowledge based on the characteristic biodiversity of the forest dwellers, peasants and healers are fast becoming privately owned transnational corporations (TNCs), which will usurp the context of collective resources through intellectual property rights by promoting, in essence , piracy and more on an intellectual level. In the current global market economy where knowledge means money, capital represents the power and the only goal is to gain: who has the money using IPRs to protect their "discoveries", often based on innovation in the acquired time and shared by traditional societies. The system of intellectual property rights has expanded the scope of the domain in order to get to include biodiversity; it, as required by the Trade Relate Intellectual Property Rights (TRLPS), however, recognizes and protects inventors only formal, not those who belong to indigenous communities and can not be defined as such. Their traditional knowledge is, therefore, pirated innovators formally recognized by scientists, breeders of plant species, experts in technology that will make changes or improvements on which negligible submitting the patent application, claiming him, therefore, as their private property.