Eric Johnston called it “the most important conference you never heard of”:
You would think that a conference that was once billed as a meeting designed to come to an agreement on a “Kyoto Protocol” for all living things would get just a bit more media respect. Or public attention.
And indeed, having just returned from Japan, I am surprised how much less media coverage COP 10 is getting outside its host country. It was by chance that I stumbled over COP 10 when in Nagoya last week and it took me a while until I understood the meaning of the acronym, which was all over the Japanese media: COP 10 stands for the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Given the technical and complex nature of the issues at stake, lay people may find it difficult to understand let alone explain what’s going on in Nagoya. However, the International Year of Biodiversity should provide reason enough to make an effort.
The most contentious issue at the conference is a possible compensation paid by drug companies to indigenous people for using and patenting their knowledge on the medical use of natural resources.
I give the word again to Eric Johnston of the Japan Times:
- Should we offer some sort of compensation to indigenous peoples for medicines from their traditional lands already on the market?
- Should we sign contracts directly with them so the next time a drug company is hiking through a biodiverse rich environment, they’ll be doing so with the approval of whoever lives on the land those plants come from?
- And how do we determine, legally, whether the knowledge of how to manipulate those plants came from ancient oral traditions or a peer-reviewed article in a scientific magazine?
- And if payments are to be made to indigenous peoples, how are they to be paid, and what does this mean for drugstore prices in developed countries?