Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesture of the GBIF will be a database containing the names of all known organismswhich, it is envisioned, will “ensure a single global nomenclature for all namedliving organisms” (Environment News Service, 1999). It is, however, precisely thecontinued existence of multiple systems of knowledge about natural organismsand their culturally specific classification systems, nomenclatures, and linguisticrelations to ecosystems that is key to maintaining the cultural diversity upon whichbiodiversity depends. 37Other government departments may also use the World Wide Web for public educationpurposes with respect to ITKIP. The federal environmental ministry inCanada, for instance, posts commissioned reports on indigenous and traditionalknowledge to its website (Lambrou, 1997; Mann, 1997; Brockman, 1997) as wellas more general examples of the Canadian government’s acknowledgement of thevalue of ITKIP in environmental policies (Blanchet-Cohen, 1996). The governmentof India is producing CD-Roms of its traditional medicinal plant knowledgewhich will be distributed to patent offices world-wide to provide a database of priorart. This database may serve to prevent the issuing of patents such as United StatesPatent 5401504 which claimed the use of turmeric for promoting wound healingwhen the practice had been known for centuries and published in India for overthirty years. Few developing countries have the resources to document and digitallydisseminate ITKIP in this fashion. For many indigenous peoples facing pressures ofassimilation and territorial encroachment, the governments of the states in whichthey are resident are not bodies that can or will be entrusted with such knowledge.There is a need then, to support indigenous peoples’ own efforts and those of supportiveNGOs to develop and provide such databases as well as protocols for accessto data and benefit sharing. Research is necessary, however, to ascertain the extentto which some forms of knowledge should be kept confidential and for what purposes.Indeed, a concern with confidentiality has resulted in the deployment of atrade secret model in one Ecuadorian project (Bodeker, 2000: 12). In this project,local and indigenous communities are invited to participate in depositing and cataloguingtraditional knowledge in a restricted access database, a determination of thepublic domain status of the knowledge will be made by the database administratorsand, to the extent that more than one community shares potentially proprietaryknowledge, a cartel of communities will be established to negotiate MaterialTransfer Agreements with the CBD state government and those interested inexploiting the knowledge for commercial use. Further research needs to be done toascertain the viability of similar trade secret models in other regions, the degree towhich violations of database confidentiality give rise to legal recourse, the extent towhich such agreements should be respected and recognised in national and regionalpatent regimes, and the desirability of amending patent law to do so.The Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental has proposed that all patent applicationsin the future should include a sworn statement as to the genetic resources, aswell as the associated knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous peoplesand local communities utilised directly or indirectly in the research and developmentof the subject matter of the patent application. This proposal could also be182