Now, Brazil and other developing countries rightly figure that they're
sitting on possibly valuable resources and want a piece of the action. The
key thing here is that with plants, especially, many (most?) of them aren't
know to science, and await organized research & development. Brazil is going
about this with a sledgehammer for a tool, interfering with the export of
ALL biological tissues. It's a protectionist operation that will ultimately
fail, by holding research hostage to economics and national pride.
Maybe a silver lining in this cloud is that it places a tangible valuation
on biodiversity that can be more directly addressed.
--Bruce Stallsmith
The Lawnmower City, AL
>What a crock!
>It's one thing when someone creates a new breed of lifeform thru
>traditional
>hybridization or genetic engineering. Or creates a new machine or writes a
>book
>or a song. But naturally evolved "genetic resources" belong to everyone and
>should be accessable to all people to employ their creativity and talents
>to
>utilize and develop. It would be injustice for governments to claim
>intellectual
>property rights to indigenous species and then sell them off to the highest
>bidder - ie transnational mega-corporations who will create monopolies on
>the
>products developed there from. Then the pharmacutical industries will be
>able to
>develop all these miriacle drugs but they will be priced beyond what the
>many
>people can afford while they reap enormous profits from natural products
>that
>they did nothing to create.
>
>There will be lots of problems with enforcing these laws.
>First of all the US has been throwing billions of dollars at drug
>traffiking for
>over a decade and the the problem refuses to abate. With armies of agents
>and
>planes and drug sniffing dogs the stuff gets to the streets in obscene
>quantities. So the police and DEA people find they cannot stop it because
>there
>are too many constitutional obstacles like the 4th Amendment in the way so
>they
>come to us and ask us to give up more of our liberties in order to make it
>easier
>for them to do their job.
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