India’s Fight Against Agricultural and Medicinal Plants’ Biopiracy: Its Implications on Food Security, Traditional Rights and Knowledge Degradation

At present, about two-third of the Indian population relies on indigenous knowledge of biological resources and have conserved their knowledge and culture through their traditional lifestyles and local economies. More than 7500 species of plants are utilized for the traditional purposes in India. The economic value of traditional knowledge in the herbal medicine and pharmaceutical sector is estimated to reach around 5 trillion by 2020. Since Indian agriculture is highly rich in biodiversity, it becomes an easy prey of biopiracy in agriculture-based business corporations. Biopiracy term is generally used when multinational corporations or companies profit from the medicinal and agricultural uses of plants known to indigenous or native societies and fail to compensate those communities. Traditional Knowledge (TK) plays a key role in the preservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. There is a threat to the future of TK due to globalization of production systems and the distance between the holders of knowledge and its exploiters. Many cases have been registered in India where attempts have been made to steal the indigenous knowledge from India due to its easy access which affect food security, livelihood of indigenous people and even cause changes in consumers’ choice. Indian government challenged many patents in the last two decades by providing numerous research papers predating those patents and these patents were thus rejected. India is the pioneer country in the world to have set up an institutional mechanism – the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) – to protect its TK.


Biopiracy in the Indian Agricultural Sector
A major fraction of the world's population, mostly the underdeveloped areas and rural communities, still rely on the indigenous medicinal knowledge of locally available plants for not just their medical requirements (Shankar 1997;Bhattacharya 2014), but also for food and agriculture (Bhattacharya 2014).Traditional knowledge not only includes the recorded knowledge of plants for medicinal use, but also takes into account the oral knowledge that has been passed on from ancestors (Bhattacharya 2014). There has been great scientific interest in the lifestyle, knowledge and culture of indigenous people since the traditional knowledge acquired by rural communities over a number of years forms their basic cultural identity. The people living in local communities maintaining fairly traditional lifestyles are termed as "indigenous people" (Andrews 2012). A majority of the Indian population (70%) is dependent on land-based occupations, forests, wetlands and marine habitats for ecological and cultural sustenance (Kothari and Patel 2006). With an estimated 163 horticultural and crop varieties which have originated in the country, India is one of the world's eight major centers of crop diversity and has centuries' old traditional knowledge (Sudha 2014). Even today, about two-third of Indian population relies on indigenous knowledge of biological resources and have conserved their knowledge and culture through their traditional lifestyles and local economies. More than 7500 species of plants are utilized for the traditional purposes in India. The plant genetic resources were considered to be a common heritage until the last century (Brush 2005). Common heritage refers to "the treatment of genetic resources as belonging to the public domain and not owned or otherwise monopolized by a single group or interest" (Brush 2005;Andrews 2012).

Biopiracy and food security
Biopiracy will increase the dependence of farmers on corporations for their agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Developing countries would face the challenges even more, since farmers of such nations cannot afford to buy seed each year and segregate a fraction of their harvest for planting in the next growing season (Yusuf 2010;Bhattacharya 2014). Biopiracy can have a devastating effect on the economy and food security of the farmers in developing countries which can ultimately destroy the locally adapted, traditional crop varieties which are cheaper alternatives (Bhattacharya et al. 2013). Since Indian agriculture is highly rich in biodiversity, it becomes an easy prey of biopiracy in agriculture based business corporations. For instance, Monsanto tried to extend their reach to the Indian population by selling genetically modified brinjals in the form of Bt Brinjals, in spite of the fact that India itself grows more than 2500 unique varieties of brinjals. The Indian National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) filed a legal action against Monsanto (and their collaborators) for accessing local eggplant varieties for development of their genetically engineered version of eggplant without taking any prior consent of the competent authorities, which is considered an act of biopiracy. The law mandates that "when biodiversity is to be accessed in any manner for commercial, research and other uses, local communities who have protected local varieties and cultivars for generations, must be consulted and if they consent benefits must accrue to them as per the internationally applicable Access and Benefit Sharing Protocol." (Ministry of Environment and forests 2010; Bhattacharya 2014).

Traditional Knowledge Degradation
The people using the Traditional Knowledge (TK) are the same who are actually holding it, using it sustainably through generations and communities. It is closely related and intertwined with the communities involved and the resources available in the environment around them. Modern system of knowledge (which is actually developed through years and not generations) and its exploitation are a result of the industrialization process, where production and not sustainable utilization is the answer (Kaushik 2004; Gupta et al. 2015). Both modern and traditional knowledge are prevailing factors in production; thus, local communities and people are been exploited in an unsustainable and inequitable manner. The holders of TK lack the awareness to protect it through modern legal systems and they do not even seek due compensation for its use (Kaushik 2004). These situations in today's world when combined together may lead to the unfortunate consequence of disappearance of overall TK (Kaushik 2004 and Gupta et al. 2015). There is a threat to the future of TK due to globalization of production systems and the distance between the holders of knowledge and its exploiters.
Another known aspect highlighted in both the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources (IU) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is that the TK plays a key role in the preservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. Numerous activities and production based on TK are the important sources of income, food, and healthcare for large parts of the populations and communities, trailing to development of the country also. Thus, TK is being rapidly lost as traditional communities are integrated into the wider societies, and the local ecosystems are been degraded (Twarog and Kapoor 2004).

India's Combat against Biopiracy
Many cases have been registered in India where attempts have been made to steal the indigenous knowledge from India due to its easy access which affect food security, livelihood of indigenous people and even cause changes in consumers' choice. The persons involved in plundering natural resources from the developing and less developed countries prosper, while the persons from whom benefits are derived suffer since they are paid only petty amounts and sometimes are not even paid at all (Bhattacharya 2014). 'Biopiracy' term is generally used when multinational corporations or companies profit from the medicinal and agricultural uses of plants known to indigenous or native societies and fail to compensate those communities" (Dwyer 2008; Andrews 2012). Alternatively, it refers to "appropriation, generally by means of patents, of legal rights over indigenous biomedical knowledge without compensation to indigenous groups who originally developed such knowledge" (Sudha 2014). There have been a number of cases of biopiracy of traditional knowledge from India, commonly observed in plant varieties such as Haldi (Turmeric), Basmati, Neem etc. (Bhattacharya 2014). According to a study conducted in 1999, global market value of industries using biological and genetic material is estimated between $500-800 billion. The economic value of traditional knowledge in the herbal medicine and pharmaceutical sector is estimated to reach around 5 trillion by 2020 (Sudha 2014;Shah 2014). A few instances of biopiracy have been presented in Table 1.
Dr. V.K. Gupta, Senior Advisor & Director of India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) at the Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) (India's largest state-owned research body), has evolved Traditional Knowledge Resource Classification (TKRC), an innovative structured classification system for systematic arrangement, dissemination and retrieval. TKDL is a unique tool that plays a critical role in protecting the country's traditional knowledge. The TKDL has been patterned on the International Patent Classifications and has been ratified by the World Intellectual Property Organization. TKDL has now become a database containing 34 million pages of formatted information on some 2,260,000 medicinal formulations in multiple languages, bridging the linguistic gap between traditional knowledge expressed in languages like Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil, and those used by patent examiners of major intellectual property (IP) offices. These have been translated into English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish (Gupta 2011).
India is the pioneer country in the world to have set up an institutional mechanism -the TKDL -to protect its TK. India's TKDL is a powerful weapon in the country's fight against erroneous patents, also referred to as "biopiracy" (Gupta 2011

International and National conventions and acts related to Biopiracy
The problem of unfair exploitation of bioresources and traditional knowledge of indigenous communities and disregard to their customary laws and practices has been arising and this makes it even more important to respect and protect the rights of such communities over such resources. Initiatives are being taken at both national and international levels to frame policies and acts for designing a protection system that does not compromise with the indigenous values, cultural heritage and free sharing of knowledge, resources and innovations over such resources that have been transferred from one generation to another. Communal control of such knowledge need to be emphasized and each country should find its own options that can only be governed by the international frameworks (Shamama 2008).
Patenting of edible plant resources, mainly wheat, maize, rice, and potato, which constitute more than 70% of our food supply will pose a threat to the consumers. The problem of intrusion of national sovereignty arises due to biopiracy when a government or a corporation from other countries utilizes and benefits from the patent varieties of genetic resources which are derived from the traditional knowledge acquired from another sovereign state. However, in the past few years, Print ISSN : 1974ISSN : -1712 Online ISSN : 2230-732X developing countries have voiced their concern in the international arena.
With the advent of technological interventions and globalization, the intellectual property rights of indigenous people have been treated as a vital issue. Patent protection for plant varieties is provided by various international conventions such as the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (1961, as revised in 1972, 1978 and 1991) (Andrews 2012;Sudha 2014) Additionally, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was adopted at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in the year 1992, which aims at conserving biodiversity through economic incentives and is considered as a powerful tool that can be employed for enforcing the rights of indigenous people. This convention "recognizes the intimate relationship between preservation of biodiversity and the protection of the traditional knowledge of indigenous populations" (Powell and Chavarro 2008) and considers plant genetic resources as tradable commodities which are subject to national sovereignty rights (Aoki 2009). It also includes the concept of national sovereignty over plants and animals as a basis for informed consent and benefit sharing (Andrews 2012). It is the first international treaty which provides opportunities to biodiversity rich countries to recognize benefits arising out of the utilization of their bioresources (Bhattacharya 2014