Amazon researchers fear ‘biopiracy’ backlash

By Michael Astor

updated 10:42 a.m. ET Oct. 27, 2005

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Somewhere in the Amazon there may be flora and fauna that hold the key to curing diseases ranging from cancer to multiple sclerosis.

That, at any rate, is the dream. But the reality is that the search for the next miracle drugs is being hampered by a deep Brazilian suspicion of “biopiracy.”

Some politicians, retired generals and Web sites seem convinced that the world’s biggest rain forest is crawling with biopirates scooping up seeds, leaves and animal blood samples whose genetic code might deliver the next miracle drug.

The government has imposed strict regulations which apply to both Brazilians and foreigners, but foreigners are more likely to get arrested. Over the past decade more than 30 have been detained, and their research samples confiscated or destroyed.

The Amazon rain forest is thought to contain at least 30 percent of all plant and animal species on the planet, most of them uncatalogued. At the same time, loggers and farmers are shrinking its area at a rate equivalent to six football fields a minute.

Scientists feel constrained
But scientists say the rules are so stringent and overzealously enforced that it has become impossible to ship samples abroad for analysis, reducing research to a crawl and driving many scientists to move their research to Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru.

Last year, police tracked two German researchers across eight Brazilian states and seized the spiders they were allegedly planning to ship to the United States.

In 2002, Marc Van Roosmalen, a Dutch scientist who has discovered some 20 new monkey species, was accused of biopiracy after authorities removed 27 rare monkeys from his home in the Amazon city of Manaus. Roosmalen says he was only studying and caring for the animals, not exploiting them for profit, and had applied for permits in 1996 and never heard back.

Brazilian scientists are feeling the squeeze too.

“The situation is so frustrating, I’ve all but given up,” says Paulo Buckup, a professor of ichthyology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who collects river fish for research. “Brazil has lost the capacity to control its own resources because it doesn’t know what it has.”

Biopiracy haunts Brazilian history, beginning with Henry Wickham, an Englishman who smuggled rubber seeds out of the country in the 19th century and broke Brazil’s global rubber monopoly.

Then came the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which produced a convention entitling nations to a share of the profits from substances yielded by their flora and fauna.

“All the signers bought into a concept no one knows how to implement. Anyone can claim you’re not sharing the benefits, and the government is afraid of being held responsible,” said Dr. Roberto Cavalcanti, a zoology professor at the University of Brasilia.

Cavalcanti agrees regulation is necessary, but feels the best way to fight biopiracy is more investment and more Brazilians doing their own collecting. He also says the biopiracy concept “has been hijacked” by opponents of measures to protect the rain forest against commercial overexploitation.

U.S. researcher called biopirate
A congressional committee is investigating biopiracy, and several prominent foreign scientists have been forced to prove they are not biopirates, including Thomas Lovejoy, the U.S. scientist credited with putting the plight of the rain forests on the world’s radar screen in the early 1980s.

He acknowledges he shares the blame for the biopiracy panic because of his own role in publicizing biodiversity.

“From my point of view, the real biopiracy is the destruction of the biodiversity of the Amazon,” said Lovejoy, president of the Heinz Center for Science Economics and the Environment.

Lovejoy was eventually cleared of vague charges that he was a CIA agent when he did research for the Smithsonian Institute in the Amazon years ago, and Congressman Jose Sarney Filho, a former environment minister on the biopiracy committee, acknowledges the investigation so far has little to show for its work.

“Up to now, we haven’t found a single concrete case of biopiracy,” Sarney told The Associated Press. “There are cases of spiders being contrabanded to American laboratories and things like that, but no material proof that our flora or fauna has been converted into medicine without following the legislation.”

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