Islands Business - Cover Story: IPR VS TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE

Controversial when it comes to cultural things

Islands Business spoke to Aroha Te Pareake Mead, a vocal figure in the protection of Traditional Knowledge and Cultural Expressions of the world’s indigenous communities.

Aroha Mead... Pacific slow in developing IPR legislation.

Mead is a founding member and co-chair of the Call of the Earth Llamado de la Tierra Steering Committee and hails from the Ngati Awa and Ngati Porou tribes of the Tairawhiti and Mataatua regions of Te Ika a Maui, the North Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Her focus is on the empowerment of local indigenous communities to initiate, manage and provide critical analysis of all research, policy and legislation relevant to them, particularly in the Pacific region.

What exactly are we talking about when we talk of IPR in the context of traditional knowledge and cultural expressions in the Pacific?

“I think there are two issues that are really important to Pacific communities. At one end of the spectrum, Pacific businesses need to be a lot more clever about how they protect their work. So one level of activity is actually about encouraging Pacific businesses to use Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to protect their creations. The other side is about issuing ethical standards about how you do that and how to make sure that when you use IPR, you’re not applying it over your culture or important cultural information that isn’t actually yours. I’m not saying that IPR in itself is a bad thing at all. It’s quite necessary in some aspects but when it comes to the use of rights to things that are commonly held, that’s when we get into controversial issues.”

You co-edited Pacific Genes and Life Patents, which highlighted some cases of “gene hunting” and “patent prospecting”—this is one area in which Pacific communities have been left “feeling besieged and betrayed” as you described it. Is this still happening in the Pacific?

“I’m not sure how much of that is going on now. But what we were trying to show in that publication is that the Pacific is like the last frontier and although most other countries have legislations around IPR, the Pacific has been slow in developing the full package of IPR legislation. Researchers are taking advantage of that and they’ve come into the region and have tried to do experiments and really dicey deals that wouldn’t slide in any other part of the world. So we wanted to highlight, through the publication, those specific cases of abuse and to reinforce the message that this is not a dumping ground and we’re not a population of guinea pigs to try shoddy technologies on or to asset a patent over a human being’s DNA.

“You just don’t do it. But that has happened in the Pacific, it is part of our history and that’s what the book hopes to address by recording it and putting people on notice. And I think we’ve been reasonably successful in that regard because it’s happening less and less. There are still people coming in and doing research but we’re putting out regular and consistent critiques of their research and that wasn’t happening 10 years ago. The reason why we were getting so many researchers coming in and taking their work to the most dangerous areas of property rights was because there wasn’t anything to tell them that it wasn’t acceptable. Now if they say: ‘oh, no, we didn’t know it was an issue’, well they are going to have a hard time proving it.”

What about the awareness among Pacific’s people?

“In that regard, I don’t think we’ve made as much headway as we’d like to. It’s a really difficult concept to take to the community level because I know that when I first got involved in this and I used to talk to my aunties and uncles about it, they would just scratch their heads and think I’ve been in the city too long. It just sounded too bizarre to them that somebody would think it was okay to assert ownership over a person’s DNA or for a company to control the use and transmission of a community’s traditional knowledge or to develop seeds that can’t re-grow. It sounded like science fiction to community people. So it’s really hard to address what’s going on at that level. It’s much easier to target businesses and tell them ‘don’t do it’ than it is to target communities and say ‘watch out’.”

How big is this patenting business?

“I think the business of food production, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, beauty products are multi-billion-dollar enterprises. For those who are able to develop products based on genetic materials, they’ve put a lot of money into their research but they get a lot back so it’s certainly well worth their effort. That’s something that we have to be watching and scrutinising all the time.”

And why are we in the Pacific such targets for these researchers?

“Researchers are carrying out bio-prospecting missions everywhere, particularly in vulnerable and isolated communities. If they’re researching European genes, there are millions of potential donors. What’s most fascinating to researchers is when they get into the differences between the cultures, cultural groups and family groups. That’s sort of the sexy part of science, for want of a better expression, and that’s where the money is to fund their research. So they are always hunting for exotic places and exotic people and the Pacific peoples fit within this.”

Finally, back to IPR, this nature of ownership seems to contradict Pacific cultures concept of ownership.

“The IPR system is premised from the point of view that an IPR owner is the first person who applies for an intellectual property right. So they have no concept of whether you should be a rightful owner, whether you are a cultural owner or whether something can even be owned. All they look at is if you are the first person who has applied for copyright or a trademark or a patent on a particular idea. Compare that to Pacific indigenous cultures where an individual really doesn’t own anything. They don’t own their bodies, they don’t own their mind, the words they speak, the music they sing or the dances that they dance. These all form part of their heritage and if they happen to be gifted and creative and produce new works, then these things become part of the next generation’s heritage. But indigenous cultures, as a rule, don’t claim—that’s not part of who we are or how we define ourselves or how we define wealth. In fact, in most cases, we define wealth not in what we have but in what we give away, our ability to host, to be generous, to give to others. So they are indeed very, very different concepts of ownership. And yes, it is very difficult for those two sides to come together and talk because they are so fundamentally different.”