Economic metaphors can be ironic, unexpectedly so. The 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) established a “multilateral mechanism for benefit-sharing from the use of digital sequence information on genetic resources, including a global fund” (Decision 15/9). The Acting Executive Secretary of the Secretariat heralds the mechanism as a “landmark.” Hope runs high. Global biotechnology sales will soon reach $1 trillion per year. Hundreds of billions are needed to finance the conservation of biodiversity. Decision 15/9 could be a goldmine. But for whom? Industries that use genetic resources are dismissive. They may point to Brazil, the most biodiverse country in the world, where legislation allows royalties as low as 0.1%. The WiLDSI Project, funded by the German Government, contemplates a benefit one order of magnitude lower than that: on a billion-dollar blockbuster biotechnology, 0.01% translates to $100,000. Why bother? A goldmine exists only if industry pays an ‘economic rent’ for commercially successful biotechnologies. The rent in any good is the difference between what one pays and what one would have paid in a competitive market. Industry enjoys rents through intellectual property rights (IPR), such as patents and copyrights. These limited-in-time monopolies allow IPR-holders to offset the costs of bringing artificial information into existence. Tokay gecko. Image by Tontan Travel via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0). By contrast, mega-diverse nations which are Parties to the CBD compete in ‘natural information,’ which is embodied in genetic resources and diffused across species and jurisdictions. Brazil is…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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