Beyond intellectual property: Toward traditional resource rights for indigenous peoples and local communities

The Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights was established in 1990 by the Global Coalition for Bio-Cultural Diversity, whose mission was to to unite indigenous peoples, scientific organizations, and environmental groups to implement a forceful strategy for the use of traditional knowledge, involvement of local peoples in conservation and development strategies, and implementation of alternative, people-centred conservation models. With support of the World Wide Fund for Nature International, funds established a mailing list and a database of publications and people interested in intellectual property rights (IPR) and to hold a number of seminars for indigenous peoples on this subject. The seminars were aimed at alerting indigenous peoples to the relevance and urgency of IPR issues in the context of two major global negotiation processes ? the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED), or Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Another purpose of the seminars was to listen to the concerns of indigenous communities so as to orient the IPR debate toward their needs, expectations, and practical problems. During the Earth Summit, the Global Coalition organized the Earth Parliament as the principal venue for indigenous and traditional peoples. This forum brought together indigenous leaders from over 80 countries to discuss issues of mutual concern, including IPR. Since the Earth Summit, dozens of conferences, seminars, and workshops have been held with indigenous peoples to discuss the evolving debate over IPR. This book embodies these efforts and the input of many people over a considerable period of time. It is organized around a series of questions that emerge in a community when a visitor arrives to collect information or cultural or biogenetic materials. These questions would be the same whether the community was an indigenous settlement in the Amazon or a village in rural England. Each chapter begins with a summary of the main issues it addresses and ends with options and suggested actions. The book concludes with some warnings and suggested actions for local communities. These are intended to help guide communities through the basic questions that they should be asking when confronting those interested in their knowledge, natural resources, or biogenetic materials. As the legal instruments used to invoke IPR are inadequate to protect the cultural, scientific, and intellectual resources of indigenous peoples, the IPR issue has outgrown its name. The term traditional resource rights (TRR) has emerged to define the many ?bundles of rights? that relate to protection, compensation, and conservation. The aim in this book then is to outline the nature of these bundles and suggest how these rights can be made accessible to local communities.