In a bid to stop “biopiracy,” researchers are building a giant database to catalogue genetic material from the world’s largest rainforest.
From the rubber in car tires, to cosmetics and medicines, genetic material contained in the Amazon region has contributed to discoveries worth billions of US dollars.
However, communities living there have rarely benefited from the genetic wealth extracted from their land — a form of theft that legal experts call “biopiracy.”
Forest communities often remain impoverished, which can drive them to find other ways to make money, such as illegal logging, said Dominic Waughray, who heads the Amazon Bank of Codes project for the World Economic Forum.
“At the heart of the conservation debate is: How do you find a way for a person in the forest to get more cash in their hand right now from preserving that habitat rather than cutting it down?” Waughray said.
One solution involves compelling investors to pay royalties to local communities when using genetic sequences from organisms extracted from the forest, he said. The Amazon Bank of Codes would facilitate those payments.
Yet those genetic sequences first need to be mapped and stored online, which is what the project backers aim to do as early as 2020.
The Amazon is home to 10 percent of all known species on Earth, the WWF says.
That makes the region vulnerable to biopiracy, which is the unlawful appropriation or commercial use of biological materials native to a particular country without providing fair financial compensation to its people or government.
“The history of biopiracy runs deep in the Amazon basin,” Waughray said, citing early colonialists taking rubber trees from the region to create lucrative plantations in Malaysia.
In a more recent case, Brazilian prosecutors launched an investigation into a California-based company earlier this year, accusing it of using genetic components of the tropical acai berry in its nutritional supplements without paying for them.
In India, attempts to patent products such as basmati rice and properties of turmeric for medical use have sparked protests.
“The phenomenon has given rise to a huge outcry to have a more ethical approach to the use of biological resources,” said Ikechi Mgbeoji, a professor of intellectual property law at Toronto’s York University.
Internationally, the Nagoya Protocol, which came into force in 2014, governs how companies and researchers should equitably share benefits from genetic material, UN Convention on Biological Diversity official Valerie Normand said.
The agreement was “implemented precisely because developing countries, which are largely hot spots for biodiversity, were concerned about the misappropriation of their genetic resources,” Normand said.
The Amazon Bank of Codes would use blockchain — decentralized digital technology allowing users to track the origins and transfers of information — to catalogue specific pieces of genetic material.
If a company or researcher wanted to use a piece of genetic code for a new medicine, study or product, they could access the bank and see exactly where in the Amazon it came from, Waughray said.
Governments, indigenous groups, non-governmental organizations and others are discussing how the fees paid to use a genetic sequence would be distributed, Waughray said.
However, critics worry the project could actually make it easier for companies to steal genetic material.
“This will become a one-stop shop for digital biopiracy,” said Jim Thomas from the Montreal-based ETC Group, a technology watchdog.
Companies could use the database of genetic codes to go prospecting to find information they need, and then slightly alter it or find another way to avoid paying royalties, he said.
“It used to be companies would send people into the Amazon to gather material,” Thomas said.
“Then they would negotiate over whether they would be able to move that material out of the country. Now, you won’t even have to leave Toronto to scan the DNA,” he said.
The Amazon Code Bank would not offer a “silver bullet” for combating the theft of genetic resources, Waughray said.
However, having a clear set of rules, and a way to track people who contravene them, would be far better than the “status quo,” Waughray said.
Less than 15 percent of the world’s estimated species of plants and land animals have been genetically classified, and less than 0.1 percent have had their DNA thoroughly sequenced, according to the World Economic Forum.
Yet, these small percentages have delivered all modern knowledge about biology and the wealth stemming from it.
Genetically mapping 10 percent of the planet’s species could trigger a wave of innovation based on biotechnology that could change lives all over the world, Waughray said.
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