Patents won't save our genetic resources: report

A report by Monash University's Australian APEC Study Centre has cast doubt on the ability of patent-based regimes to provide enough incentive to protect the world's genetic resources.

The paper, Developing Effective Approaches to Access to Genetic Resources, was released at last month's meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity's Working Group on Access and Benefit Sharing of bio-resources in Bangkok, Thailand, which is working to set up an international regime on access to genetic resources.

According to study author and chairman of the APEC Study Centre, Alan Oxley, while preserving the world's biodiversity is important, using patents to do so is the wrong approach.

He says the idea that changing intellectual property and patent laws to control access to genetic resources and limit biopiracy was unlikely to work.

"It's a fallacy to suggest there is a connection between changing IP law and protecting genetic resources," Oxley says. "Patent laws are too far removed from the issue of access to genetic resources to have an effect."

In fact, he says, while there are a lot of claims of biopiracy, a dispassionate look at them reveals very few cases.

But a group of mega-diverse countries, including Bolivia, Brazil, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, Congo, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malaya, Mexico, Peru, The Philippines, South Africa and Venezuela, are advocating changes to intellectual property law to impose conditions on the use of patents on the inventions developed from genetic materials. Their approach is to support the creation of a new and binding international regime that would override existing intellectual property law governed by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the WTO Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

"Some 'mega-diverse' countries (countries with large biodiversities) had proposed placing conditions on patents on things developed from genetic resources as a tool for protecting biodiversity," says Oxley. "The general idea is to require approval for each use of a product based on a patent after the patent was issued."

But such an approach is likely to dissuade pharmaceutical and biotechnology countries from exploring the biodiversity of the developing world, he says.

"Companies would not invest in research and development if they did not know if they could use new products based on patents," Oxley says.

"The result in mega-diverse countries would be less investment in biotech sectors and less capacity-building in local communities."

Instead, he says, it would be better to create effective and enforceable systems for access to genetic resources as has been done in Costa Rica, where bioprospectors pay fees to the government for the right to conduct exploration and discovery, and fees and royalties for the exploitation of their discoveries.