A Pluriversal Glossary of ABS

III. Voices from the field:

 

Voices from public authorities:

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Guardianship: Public officials in charge of ABS often see their role as guardians of the country’s valuable genetic resources, which should be protected from extraction and appropriation by foreign entities. This role of guardian also includes using the power of the state to help the country’s Indigenous Peoples and local communities protect their traditional knowledge from extraction and appropriation by external users. A major motivation at play in this role is the development of the country’s bioeconomy in a context of international competition.

 

National bioeconomy: From the perspective of public authorities, once valuable GR and TK of the country have been accessed and transferred abroad without free prior informed consent (FPIC), and without a benefit-sharing agreement in place, it is a loss for the country’s bioeconomic potential, and a potential gain for another country’s bioeconomic development. Since many users have a priori an interest in accessing GR and TK for free, either to develop commercial applications themselves, or to trade these resources to subsequent users for a profit, regulators tend to look at users with suspicion.

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Permit systems: As a result, public authorities of countries having a high biocultural diversity are particularly keen on monitoring and controlling access. To know who is accessing which GR and TK in the country, and to ensure that every instance of access is performed in compliance with the country’s ABS regulations, they rely on access permit systems that, from their viewpoint, should have the wides possible scope and as few loopholes as possible.

 

Voices from Indigenous Peoples and local communities:

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Biocultural identity: Traditional or Indigenous knowledge is an intrinsic part of the lively biocultural identity and resources of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. This knowledge has been gained through centuries of observation, trial and error, human-plant communication, and oral transmission. It informs cultural practices of nutrition, healing, cosmetics, and ceremonies, among others, and it is enmeshed with communal values, norms, and politics. In some cases, traditional / indigenous knowledge is still an intrinsic part of a collective identity and ways of life that are anchored in a particular place. However, this link between knowledge, people, and places, has been historically disrupted, and it still faces numerous threats. 

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(Post)colonial harm: In the course of colonial history, Indigenous knowledge and all that comes with it have been extensively damaged by the enslavement or killing of knowledge-holders; by spatial exclusion through land appropriation and enclosure, as well as by forced displacements, which together severed the ties between people and places; as well as by more or less (un)intentional forms of epistemic violence, including acculturation through forceful enrolment in schools, and the tendency of modern scientific institutions to discard or distort Indigenous knowledge. Against this backdrop, members of Indigenous Peoples and local communities often experience the unauthorised access, appropriation and use of their knowledge by outsiders as a form of (post)colonial violation and destitution: outsiders (researchers, students, bioprospectors, entrepreneurs) come to them, retrieve knowledge from them, take samples, and disappear, without having obtained the consent from the appropriate Indigenous authorities, and without benefits flowing back to the community.

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Recognition and inclusion: Members of Indigenous Peoples and local communities therefore tend to consider ABS as an important source of recognition and rights. What is at stake for them can be more than a transactional retribution for the authorisation to access and use their traditional knowledge. ABS is also about acknowledgment of past colonial harm and the practice of postcolonial reparation; recognition of Indigenous sovereignty over biocultural knowledge, resources and identity;  and economic inclusion through access of community members, especially from the youth, to economic chances. As several Indigenous participants of TEGA emphasised, they often feel "unseen", "overlooked", or "ignored" by mainstream society, with their views and concerns not being taken into account at par with those of other social groups, and with outsiders (e.g. politicians, researchers, entrepreneurs) generally coming to them to get something (electoral support, information, natural resources...) through a short-term utilitarian engagement that leaves the community as marginalised as it was before. 

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Access and marginalisation: From the viewpoint and experience of Indigenous Peoples and local communities, the issue of access raised by ABS often goes both ways. It is not only about the conditions under which outsiders access and use their resources and knowledge. It is also a matter of them having or not access to resources and life chances against the backdrop of entrenched inequalities. Access to plants and other natural resources and to the land where they are located, which was privatised and enclosed, or notified as a natural protected area; access to knowledge such as scientific knowledge held and transmitted by institutions of higher education; and access to economic chances located higher up in biotrade value chains. From this perspective, ABS is sometimes viewed as a potential mechanism for marginalised members of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to receive monetary and non-monetary benefits that they will be able to reinvest for upward social mobility.

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Access and decolonial reparation: Some indigenous leaders and activists go further. For them, ABS is a starting point to claim and fight for a more fundamental right: the right to grant or withhold FPIC to outsiders (including descendents of colonial settlers) for conducting any economic activity on ancestral land that was stolen from them, and the right to obtain shared benefits from such activity in the name of decolonial compensation.

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Who are problematic ‘outsiders’: ABS tends to oppose scientific and commercial users, especially those from global North countries, and resource and knowledge providers, especially from Indigenous Peoples and local communities. However, Indigenous Peoples and communities are often more directly preoccupied with other ‘outsiders’ who access and extract their resources: harvesters and traders from outside the community, who intrude in the community’s area to harvest valuable medicinal plants, wild food plants, and other resources, without sharing any benefits nor respecting sustainable harvesting practices. While this problem is widespread and acute, as it contributes to disposession and the depletion of natural resources under the custodianship of the community, it is not addressed by current ABS frameworks.

 

Voices from users of genetic resources and traditional knowledge:

 

Access in practice: In the experience of individuals and organisations whose activities fall under the regulatory scope of ABS, the notion of access is problematic, because access presupposes the anticipation of a clear moment where a user reaches out and gets hold of a tangible GR and/or of intangible TK. However, access often simply happens in unexpected ways, such as a person mentioning in a conversation that in her/his village, this illness has been traditionally treated with extracts from this particular plant. Moreover, this person sharing the information might not be a recognised traditional knowledge-holder as per the ABS laws and regulations of the country. More generally, knowledge is not a static entity that one accesses, but a dynamic and evolving flux of information that involves extensive hybridisation and cross-pollination. All the more so in contexts where digital technologies spur the use of digital sequence information (DSI) in biodiversity research, bioprospecting and innovation. Against this backdrop, the behavioural expectations of ABS permit application procedures are often experienced by users as being too rigid compared with the fluctuating and diverse reality of exchanges of GR and TK among human beings in real-life situations.

 

The scope of regulated access: Users also find it challenging to know what kind of resources and knowledge are covered by ABS laws and regulations. For instance, a user shared the story of a weed that was accessed and used to develop an essential oil. According to this person, the scientific literature locates the origins of this weed outside of South Africa, with the spread of this weed in South Africa being quite recent. However, a traditional council that the government recognises as one of the official representatives of Indigenous TK-holders in the country claimed that it is an Indigenous plant traditionally used by communities and hence requiring FPIC and benefit-sharing. More generally, users point at uncertainties and controversies regarding which plant and/or knowledge should be considered “Indigenous”, with regulators sometimes defining a plant as “Indigenous” while botanical science classifies this plant as non-Indigenous.

 

The ambivalent connotation of access: A further aspect raised by users concerns the connotation of access in ABS. From their viewpoint, access is a necessary condition to produce new knowledge and develop new commodities that benefit society as a whole, even if these benefits are unequally distributed. Access is therefore something positive and useful that should not be unnecessarily impeded. However, in the context of ABS, access would often be negatively connoted as "extractivism", "appropriation", or "biopiracy". Users suffer from this conception that tends to put communities and plants on the “good side”, and to treat them as the “bad guys” who must be monitored and controlled. This connotation creates a feeling of being misrepresented, while in fact, most researchers and entrepreneurs think of themselves as hardworking and honest citizens who grow new knowledge and produce new useful commodities for the common good. According to some users, the normative distinction between the "good guys" and the "bad guys" also tends to entrench postcolonial divides and mistrust, and thereby to impede the mutually beneficial co-production of useful knowledge and commodities.

 

The costs of regulatory barriers to access: Users of GR and TK generally experience ABS regulations, including especially permit systems, as a detrimental source of costs and practical difficulties. In contemporary society, scientific research, bioprospecting and biotrade are often high-paced activities conducted with limited resources (e.g., worktime, funds) under hard competitive pressures. Users experience ABS permit systems as complicated, time consuming, and costly. According to them, regulatory requirements and restrictions imposed by ABS regulations contribute to choking small and medium companies, to deterring entrepreneurship (including among local communities), to overburdening scientific research on GR and TK (especially for international research projects), and to chasing away foreign multinational companies that end up circumventing countries with demanding ABS regulations for the benefit of countries having lower ABS requirements.

 

Simplification (scientific users): Scientific users have been advocating open access to information and a shift from current ‘command & control’ regulations to soft law (e.g., guidelines; codes of conduct; internal ethical clearance mechanisms). They highlight good practices of obtaining consent from Indigenous knowledge-holders and sharing benefits in fields such as ethnobotany. They argue that such practices should be advertised, encouraged, and normalised, as opposed to relying on permit systems and cumbersome benefit-sharing negotiations. One South African scientific user interviewed as part of TEGA advocates a digital platform that would operate like a market place, with registered Indigenous resource and knowledge holders (e.g., traditional healers) offering consented access to their GR or TK, and registered scientific users being able to gain rapid access to this GR or TK under conditions specified in a preformatted benefit-sharing agreement. While such a system would simplify access for scientific users, it is based on the questionable assumption that Indigenous knowledge is held and managed by individuals, instead of being a collective good managed by communal bodies such as traditional authorities, councils, or committees.

 

Simplification (commercial users): Commercial users also advocate simple, cost-effective and time-effective procedures for ABS compliance, for instance based on benefit-sharing agreement templates that would entail a limited number of options to streamline benefit-sharing negotiations, and hence to ease access. Because commercial users know they are easily suspected by others of postcolonial extractivism, unethical appropriation of resources, and capitalist greed, they generally do not openly advocate open access. Some do, with the argument that knowledge and biodiversity should be treated as common goods - a collective heritage of humanity that should be freely accessible, so as to ease its use, its valorisation, and its collective transmission and augmentation for the benefits of society as a whole. References to biocultural diversity as a common heritage of mankind have be denounced by proponents of ABS as a problematic justification of private appropriation and commodification, which benefits primarily privileged actors and social groups. However, treating biocultural heritage as a common good, instead of a commodifiable resource, can also challenge economic arrangements that are based on the private appropriation and commodification of the commons, and support the adoption of more communal and convivial economic models.

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