Brent Berlin - Bioprospecting and The Maya ICBG Controversy

Bioprospecting and The Maya ICBG Controversy

In 1998 Berlin and his wife, Dr. Elois A Berlin, founded an International Cooperative Biodiversity Group - the Maya ICGB. The group was intended as a combined bioprospecting and research cooperative between the University of Georgia where the Berlins were employed, a Mexican university, a Welsh pharmaceutical company and a newly created NGO called PROMAYA supposed to represent the Indigenous Maya of Chiapas. The aim was to collect and document the ethnobotanical knowledge of the Maya peoples of Chiapas, one of the world's biodiversity hotspots with regards discovering, patent, produce and market medicines based on Maya ethnobiological knowledge. The NGO PROMAYA was established as a foundation through which the project could share rights and benefits with the indigenous holders of the medicinal knowledge.

Soon after being initiated the project became the subject of harsh criticisms by indigenous activists and Mexican intellectuals who questioned how knowledge obtained from individual Maya could be patented by researchers or foreign pharmaceutical companies, how the PROMAYA NGO established by the Berlins and under their control could be considered representative of the many different Maya communities in Chiapas, and how it was possible for the knowledge that had been collective property of the Maya peoples to become suddenly privatized without the prior consent of each of the individual initual holders of the knowledge. The Berlins argued that the establishment of the NGO was the only feasible way of managing benefit sharing with the community and of obtaining prior informed consent, and they that since the traditional knowledge was in the public domain among the Maya no individual Maya could expect remuneration. As tensions mounted the Mexican partner withdrew its support for the project, and later the NIH causing the project to be closed down in 2001 - without having been able to produce any results.

No one have seriously doubted that Berlin and the ICBG had the best intentions of ethical conduct - but nonetheless there remain serious criticisms of the way in which the project was planned and carried out. The Maya ICBG case was among the first to draw attention to the problems of distinguishing between bioprospecting and biopiracy, and to the difficulties of securing community participation and prior informed consent for bioprospectors.