Knowledge is the fundamental basis of survival by indigenous people
by Azzurra Carpo
Interview with Alejandro Argumedo, expert in biodiversity
According to the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin — representing more than 400 indigenous groups (2.5 million people) in nine South American countries — there are 5 million species in the Amazon (flora and fauna), of which only 1.4 million have been studied.
The Amazonian indigenous peoples depend on the control, conservation and development of these resources. Nevertheless, multilateral trade accords and systems of protection of intellectual property try to use traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples to generate exclusive commercialization rights.
Azzurra Carpo, contributor to Latinamerica Press, spoke with Peruvian researcher Alejandro Argumedo, associate director of the Cusco, Peru-based Quechua-Aymara Association for Sustainable Communities, about the importance and value of traditional indigenous knowledge.
What is the importance and characteristics of traditional indigenous knowledge?
Sixty percent of the world lives from indigenous knowledge to maintain their health and 80 percent of the world — according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) — need indigenous knowledge to survive, eat and carry out sustainable agriculture.
According to the UN Development Program (UNDP), more than 1.4 billion people who inhabit the countryside live on less than US$1 a day. Among these people, who are the world’s poorest, the great majority are indigenous people. What do these people live on? Obviously biodiversity: seeds, medicinal plants, forests, fish. The access to this biodiversity is essential for daily sustenance, it is a defense against poverty and fundamental for self-employment. Therein lies the importance of the transmission of knowledge on how to conserve these resources and develop biodiversity which is passed on from generation to generation among indigenous peoples. They maintain and recreate these resources constantly.
Indigenous knowledge is fundamental for maintaining equity in the communities through a system of re-distribution and other local models. Unfortunately, indigenous knowledge is integral and comes from experience; it is a something that we cannot separate or abstract. When we talk about indigenous knowledge, we are talking about a system that is integrated, in which spiritual and cultural aspects are closely linked. This knowledge is the basis of survival of these indigenous peoples.
How would you explain the relation between indigenous knowledge and intellectual property?
Globalization has brought a great international push of the systems of intellectual property. Although in many cases the terms "traditional knowledge" and "indigenous knowledge" are interchangeable, these definitions are having an effect on indigenous rights and on the international debate about the access to genetic resources, the equitable distribution of profits and about who has rights to patents. There is a direct link between indigenous knowledge and indigenous rights.
We are against patents on forms of life, against the monopolization on the privatization of traditional knowledge. Bio-piracy is the illicit appropriation in the area of agriculture, medicinal plants, of anything that is human genetics, made by companies of indigenous knowledge and associated genetic resources. By doing this, neither human rights nor ethics are respected.
What ethical-scientific problems are derived from biopiracy?
There is an idea that everything published by anthropologists, historians, chroniclers, is in the public domain. Nevertheless, in many cases of indigenous knowledge in the public domain, the communities have never given their previous and informed consent. For example, the system of genetic banks on the world level, botanic gardens that collected seeds without the permission of the communities. And this is not only taking away the genetic material and the plants: is also taking away knowledge, taking away history, taking away the cultural relations that one has with this whole system. Among every indigenous people, on the local level, there are systems and models of distribution of knowledge, systems that regulate how information is transferred, for example, about a seed.
In what terms is bio-piracy discussed on an international level?
The international regime that is being developed on biodiversity seeks more the commercialization of indigenous knowledge and the associated resources, rather than the promotion or protection that would allow communities to maintain their production systems, their health systems, to look for educational systems that are more integrated with the environment, that is, the rights that are associated with our future generations. Rather (this regime) seeks how to privatize, through a supposed technical improvement, this knowledge.
There is no international framework for the protection of these rights in a way that reflects the cosmo-vision and character itself of this indigenous knowledge. Neither is there a clear process where these rights can be established.
I believe in the need to change the debate. We should look more at the value that these systems of knowledge have, not look so much at the genetic resources, the environmental services because the management of the ecosystem makes it possible for us to have water, grazing lands, firewood, seeds.
Source: www.oneworld.net
