Bootlegacy: Liz Nevis on intellectual and cultural property http://bootlegacylaw.com Being an Attorney's Explorations into the Laws of Intellectual and Cultural Property Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:28:21 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.1.2 en Landraces: On the “verge” of becoming crops http://bootlegacylaw.com/2007/04/03/landraces-on-the-verge-of-becoming-crops/ http://bootlegacylaw.com/2007/04/03/landraces-on-the-verge-of-becoming-crops/#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2007 05:55:21 +0000 Elizabeth Nevis http://bootlegacylaw.com/2007/04/03/landraces-on-the-verge-of-becoming-crops/ Road verges. Windbreaks. The vicinities of abandoned fields, market grounds, and storage sheds. When most people think of biodiversity conservation, these are not the places that come to mind. Much more familiar are wild-land conservation areas - rainforests, wetlands, tundra, even tidepools and undersea canyons - places virtually untouched by human occupation. However, the smaller, humbler areas around traditional farming communities are sources of agricultural biodiversity (”agro-biodiversity”). Agro-biodiversity hasn’t had as much global press as wild-land biodiversity - it’s less photogenic, for one thing - but it affects the security of the food supply in agricultural societies. As climates, soil compositions, and local dominant wild species (both crop-eating pests and competing weeds) change, a crop is only as resilient as its gene pool is deep.
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]]> http://bootlegacylaw.com/2007/04/03/landraces-on-the-verge-of-becoming-crops/feed/ Bio - (prospectors or pirates? Neither metaphor is known for generosity, or good grooming) http://bootlegacylaw.com/2007/03/29/bio-prospectors-or-pirates-neither-metaphor-is-known-for-generosity-or-good-grooming/ http://bootlegacylaw.com/2007/03/29/bio-prospectors-or-pirates-neither-metaphor-is-known-for-generosity-or-good-grooming/#comments Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:23:35 +0000 Elizabeth Nevis http://bootlegacylaw.com/?p=8 No matter what you call these globe-trotting researchers (often pharmaceutical companies or entities hoping to attract the favorable attention of pharmaceutical companies), this is what their detractors say they do: 

  1. Go someplace that has flora or fauna with unusual or unknown characteristics.  In a lot of these places, the people who live there are poor.  Possibly, given more money, the locals would have already paved over the flora, killed off the fauna, and built modern roads, houses, and stores.  At least, when I visited the Peruvian Amazon a few years ago, that’s what a couple of the local folks I met said they’d prefer to do.
  2.  Ask local healers which plants or animal parts are medicinal, and for what, and exactly how to prepare them and how they work. 
  3. Go home with the collected knowledge and materials and lab-tweak them into a mass-producible, marketable, globally shippable product.
  4. Patent it and make a lot of money.
  5. Never pay the so-helpful locals one thin dime.

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