05/08/2022
"In Africa, the San peoples, who, according to their tradition, do not eat while hunting, live around the Kalahari desert in southern African and use the steam of a cactus, called Hoodia, to stave off hunger and thirst on long hunting trips. South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) began looking for pharmaceutical profit potential in the Hoodia in the early 1960s based on the ethnobotanical knowledge of the San. In 1997 they secured a patent on the appetite-suppressing active substance of the Hoodia, called P57. CSIR licensed the development rights for Hoodia to Phytopharm, a company based in the United Kingdom. Phytopharm later sublicensed to Pfizer, the U.S. pharmaceutical giant, for development of an anti-obesity drug based on P57. While all of this research, patenting, and dealmaking was going, nobody bothered to inform the San nor obtain their prior informed consent for the use of their Indigenous knowledge. Phytopharm representatives later claimed they believed the San people who used Hoodia were extinct. In fact, the San number 100,000 across South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Angola.
Finally, in 2003, the CSIR offered the San a benefit sharing arrangement, but only after CSIR and Phytopharm had been widely, publicly criticized for failing to obtain the consent of the San for the use of their knowledge. The San's share amounts to less than 0.003 percent of net sales, and that percentage only comes out of CSIR's share in the deal; Phytopharm's and Pfizer's earnings will go untouched. A disturbing aspect of the agreement rewards the San for their knowledge of Hoodia but explicitly prevents them from using that knowledge in any other commercial application. Thus, the ancient knowledge of the San has been silenced and alienated from their own use because it is now under the control of the patent regime.
It's difficult to see how benefit sharing agreements that allow for the monopolization and alienation of Indigenous knowledge and genetic resources in the guise of intellectual property protection can be of any meaningful benefit to Indigenous peoples. In the end, the benefits that come to Indigenous peoples are likely to be quite insignificant compared to those reaped by the pharmaceutical, agricultural or chemical companies and academic institutions with which they are dealing."
-Debra Harry
