Extracted From Malaysian Today

Date: 26 February 2001

STOP THIS STEALING

NGOs urge action on biopiracy

By Aljay Barieng

MIRI: The non-governmental organisations (NGOs), attending the South-South Biopiracy Summit here, have called on their respective governments to stop biopiracy in their local communities.

Representatives of 30 NGOs from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines at the end of the summit yesterday called on their respective governments to bring their indigenous communities in discussions on the exploitation of their biological and genetic resources.

"People living in ancestral lands in South-East Asia are deeply concerned about the unauthorised removal of biological resources since they had not been involved by their governments in key decision about the utilisation of their resources and knowledge," Raymond Abin, an executive director of the Borneo Resources Institute said yesterday.

Borneo Resources Institute is a NGO working on natural resources issues in Sarawak.

He said biopiracy from the indigenous communities for commercial use, deprived these people of a chance to participate in discussions on how these resources might be utilised.

Communities left out of discussion on issues

"In this era of computers and cell phones, the utilisation of resources through biopiracy had become a problem since the communities have been left out of discussions concerning the issue and have not been given access to information."

He added: "In Sarawak, for example, the state government had failed to include the indigenous community in discussions involving the development of an anti-AIDS compound from the bintangor tree, which is currently undergoing the second phase of clinical trials in Singapore."

In Indonesia, he added, the NGO, Bioforum had documented many instances of local researchers working with foreign collaborators on how the local resources were utilised.

"Many of these resources could be commercialised for future medical or pharmaceutical uses," the group said.

Meanwhile, the South East Asia Regional Institute for Community Education (SEARICE), a Philippine-based NGO said its government, in spite of it being the first to enact access regulations, had failed to take positive steps to assert the rights of local and indigenous communities like the Talaandig community in Bukidnon, in the southern part of the country.

"In fact, in Palawan Province, the Palawan NGO Network Inc. (PNNI) said that even a government-created office called the Palawan Council for Sustainable Staff had kept to itself the discussions concerning the development of an anti-cancer compound using a plant from Palawan."

SEARICE also pointed to another Philippines-based NGO, the Tambuyog Development Center, had argued that fishing communities had not been given adequate information in order to even understand how biopiracy might affect them.

Julie Delahanty of Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) said even if the governments of these countries are not inclined to recognise them, communities need to assert their rights to determine what happens to their resources.

Given this lack of government initiative on the issue, the NGOs, which met during the Summit, have developed an action plan to stop biopiracy in their communities.

Delahanty has helped these NGOs bring this issue of biopiracy to the attention of developed countries in the West.