On bees (and you do know about that)

Death of the Bees: GMO Crops and the Decline of Bee Colonies in North America

by Brit Amos

Commercial beehives pollinate over a third of [North}America’s crops and that web of nourishment encompasses everything from fruits like peaches, apples, cherries, strawberries and more, to nuts like California almonds, 90 percent of which are helped along by the honeybees. Without this pollination, you could kiss those crops goodbye, to say nothing of the honey bees produce or the flowers they also fertilize’.¹

This essay will discuss the arguments and seriousness that affects the massive deaths and the decline of Bee colonies in North America. As well, it will shed light on a worldwide hunger issue that will have an economical and ecological impact in the very near future.

There are many reasons given to the decline in Bees, but one argument that matters most is the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) and Terminator seeds that are presently being endorsed by governments and forcefully utilized as our primary agricultural needs of survival. I will argue what is publicized and covered by the media is in actuality, masking the real problems of Terminator seeds and Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO’s).

Genetically modified seeds produced and distributed by powerful biotech conglomerates manipulate government and agricultural policy to encompass their agenda of dominance in the agricultural industry. American conglomerates such as Monsanto, Pioneer HiBred and others, have created seeds that reproduce only under certain conditions, often linked to the use of their own brands of fertilizer and/or insecticide.

The sterilizing of the plant leads to sterilizing the flower pollen which has genetically modified in accordance with the interests of the biotech companies. If the flower pollen becomes genetically modified or sterile, the bees will potentially go malnourished and die of illness due to the lack of nutrients and the interruption of the digestive capacity of what they feed on through the summer and over the winter hibernation process.

I will argue that the media’s publications distracts public opinion of the true cause of the Colony Collapse of Bees. As such, outlined are four major arguments which the biotech conglomerates (which produce GMO seeds) have used to mislead public awareness concerning the demise of the bees. These arguments include Varroa mites, parasites, cell phones, and terminator seeds

Argument 1: Varroa mites²

Firstly, while there are some people who want to pin the blame on these mites, such views are unconvincing in that the argument does not make any sense because the main source of disease for these bees is intestinal disease. In fact, ‘many bee experts assumed Varroa mites were a major cause of the severe die-off in the winter of 2005. Yet when researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, traveled to Oakdale, California, where Anderson and a number of his fellow beekeepers spend winter and spring, they could find no correlation between the level of Varroa mite infestation and the health of bee colonies. ‘We couldn’t pin the blame for the die-off on any single cause,’ says Jeff Pettis, a research entomologist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland,³ However, treatments against mites may be leaving hives open to the onslaught of powerful pathogens, much in the same way the overuse of antibiotics lead to super bugs in society today. What does that say about our future? We have learned that in the 1960’s and 1970’s, among other human ailments, DDT was a major cause of cancer in humans and animals; however, the substitution of such pesticides was a closely guarded secret. Unfortunately, the long term effects on the human population has yet to be understood as the compromise of the immune system may be happening quicker than we are ready to accept, even regarding the advent of super bugs. One can see that even this medical implication has severe economical implications.

Argument 2: Parasites

Secondly; Crops and even hedges, verges, and woodlands, and even where bees remain are sprayed with pesticides or herbicides. These chemicals are the practical extension of an exasperating belief that nature is our enemy. Pouring poison on our food is a very simplistic way of dealing with our problems however it ignores the root causes. “New genetically modified crops, designed to be immune to certain pesticides and herbicides, have resulted in the increased usage of these chemicals. Pesticides, particularly Bayer’s imidacloprid, a nicotine-based product marketed under the names Admire, Provado, Merit, Marathon, and Gaucho have been concretely implicated⁴ in the destruction of bee populations before (see also)⁵. The fact that other bees and insects are not raiding deserted hives to feed on the honey as they normally would lends some credence to the theory of a toxic overload. The toxic overload is certainly a concern, but wouldn’t it also need to be considered that this is systematic in the degeneration of the digestive process, such as in humans inability to digest preservatives and not absorb the enzymes to break down the foods eaten for survival?

Argument 3: cell phones

Thirdly, there was also a misconstrued study on cell phone radiation ⁶ and its effects on the bee’s ability to navigate which turned out to be an over-zealous unthinking reaction by an article in the Independent news. Some have also mentioned other navigational hindrances such as UV radiation, shifting magnetic fields and even quantum physics⁷ as a reason to the destruction of the bees.

There is certain implications to this theory, and it has been proven that electromagnetic radio wave lengths to affect the navigation of the bees. However the sun emits radiation spurts all the time, yet this has not offered a hindrance to the bees.

Argument 4: Terminator Seeds

Lastly, ‘Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show that Canada wants all governments to accept the testing and commercialization of “Terminator” crop varieties. These seeds are genetically engineered to produce only infertile seeds, which farmers cannot replant, also to mention that the bees that are trying to collect pollen, found to have their digestive tract diseases, such as amoeba and nosema disease’⁸. These diseases are mainly located in the digestive tract system. After studies of the autopsy, the most alarming trait is that the lower intestine and stinger have discolored to black vs. the normal opaque color, Synominus with colon cancer in humans.

Figure 1: Extreme discoloration of intestinal tracts of bees.

‘When thoracic discs were cut from sample Georgia A-2 the musculature of bees was notably soft and discolored (A) when compared to healthy thoracic cuts (B).

This discoloration suggests that the bees were dead upon collection. When questioned the beekeeper confirmed that the bees were alive at the time of collection. Further, the tracheal system of these bees did not show signs of desiccation usually associated

with the collection of dead bees. Thoracic discs from this sample, after being placed in KOH for 24 hours, revealed peculiar white nodules”⁹

As seen above, it is certain that the digestive shutdown is due to hard material in the digestive tract that compromises the immune system. Circulatory problems would without doubt. Could it be that humans are going through the same process with the rise of Colon Cancer? As seen below in the comparison of the healthy Bee and the unhealthy bee, it is obvious that the bees that are ingesting GMO pollen are having severe digestive problems, so severe that the disease is terminal.

Figure 2: Digestive shutdown of the Honey Bee

The rectal contents of Georgia bees (A) were distinctly different then the contents of Pasadena bees (B). The rectal walls of GA bees were notably transparent revealing contents that looked like small stone packets (C). While Fyg (1964) describes similar stone like contents in poorly laying queens, the stones observed in the GA bees were not attached to the epithelium layer as Fyg (1964) describes. When these packets were ground and mounted, some unidentified floating objects (UFO’s) were observed. A cubic particle that resembles the cubic bodies of polyhedrios viruses (this viruses attacks wax moths) excepting that the cube observed was ~10x too big for a virus particle. There were fragments of pollen grains husks in all samples examined. All PA samples were found to have nosema spores in their rectal contents while none of the GA samples did. In two samples, epithelial cells were packed with spores.¹⁰

The North American reliance on bees for pollination is at minimum from 30 to 40%. Does it not seem obvious that the digestion of foreign genetic agriculture directly affects the digestive process of the bees. Could it also be that there are similarities in the human population digestive process? It must also be noted that this increased epidemic of the bee colony collapse has risen significantly since the use of GMO agriculture in our foods. It is also suspect in the rise of new cases of medical ailments in humans such as colon cancer, obesity, heart disease, etc... In the writers’ opinion, the inability of the bees to pass matter digestively is quite similar to the present problems in the human digestive system

Conclusion:

The proof is obvious that one of the major reasons of the bees’ decline is by the ingestion of GMO proteins. This is problematic, as there is such an increase of indigestible foods in humans and bees. The situation of colon cancer in humans is somewhat similar in occurrence. This is only a theory but leaves one to wonder what are we eating en mass. The external or complementary good of the bee is obviously a rise for a global concern. The long-term economical and environmental impact has yet to be completely understood.

The Ecological Impact of horizontal gene transfer and increase of rampant disease is not fully examined and if so, is kept silent by these Conglomerates. The Economic Impact of the Colony collapse would mean higher inflation, scarcity of agricultural goods, and ultimately the collapse of North America Agriculture Business.

The Environmental Impact of scarcity and increased demand for resources, will beyond doubt have severe repercussions for our long-term food security. The bio-diversity of the bees causes positive economic and ecological externalities. The negative externalities have yet to be fully grasped or understood.

Organic crops: still relatively untouched

The truth is that organic farming is relatively untouched as the bee crisis is concerned. Organic farming maintains the diversity of the eco-system and preserves the quality of the foods produced. The economic impact that the scarcity of bees will potentially have on our society as a whole is very worrisome. In the end, only our children will fully realize; that

it was

greed

that destroyed our beautiful blue planet.

References:

Thill, John. Colony Collapse: Do Massive Bee Die-Off Mean an End to Our Food System as We Know it? AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/module (Accessed 7/9/2007 10:06 PM)

Colony Collapse Disorder. Wikkapedia Encyclopedia Online

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/’Colony Collapse Disorder’

(Accessed July 12, 2007)

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)

www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/pressReleases/FallDwindleUpdate0107.pdf

(Accessed June 30, 2007)

CROP PROTECTION. Monthly 28 February 2001 – Issue No 135

Market Scope Europe Ltd.

http://www.crop-protection-monthly.co.uk (Accessed July 10, 2007)

HONEY BEE Research Program. RIRDIC Honeybee Research Program Home Page. http://rirdic. gov.au/program/hb.html#top, (Accessed July 7, 2007)

Ho, Dr. Mae-Wan. ‘Recent Evidence Confirms Risks of Horizontal Gene Transfer’. ISIS Contribution to ACNFP/Food Standards Agency Open Meeting 13 November 2002, Institute of Science in Society, PO Box 32097, London NW1 0XR (Accessed July 16, 2007)

ISIS Contribution. ‘Recent Evidence Confirms Risks of Horizontal Gene Transfer”. ISIS Contribution to ACNFP/Food Standards Agency Open Meeting 13 November 2002 (Accessed July 17, 2007)

Vidal, John. ‘Canada backs terminator seeds’, The Guardian. Wednesday, February 9, 2005.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/ (Accessed July 17, 2007)

Wilson, Dan. Lost colonies: ‘Where have the bees gone’? Appelton Post-Crescent, 5/18/2007 (Accessed July 19, 2007)

What’s Causing the Mass Disappearance of Honeybees? ‘What is causing the Dramatic decline in Honeybee Populations in the U.S and Elsewhere in Recent years’? HealthNewsDigest.com – New York, NY, June 2, 2007

http:/www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php (Accessed July 10, 2007)

Notes

¹ Hill, Scott. AlterNet, Posted on June 11, 2007, Printed on July 9, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/53491/

² http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/06sum/bees2.asp

³ ‘The Vanishing’

http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/06sum/bees2.asp

⁴ http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2003/11/26/millions_of_bees_dead_bayers_gaucho_blamed.htm

⁵ http://www.valleyvoicenewspaper.com/vv/stories/beedeaths.htm

⁶ http://independent.co.uk/environment/news/article2449968

⁷ http://www.synchronizm.com/blog/index.php/2007/03/29/the-bees-who-flew-too-high/

⁸ Vidal, John. ‘Canada backs terminator seeds’ Wednesday February 9, 2005. The Gaurdian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/

⁹ Fall Dwindle Disease: A preliminary report

http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/pressReleases/FallDwindleUpdate0107.pdf

December 15, 2006

¹⁰ Fall Dwindle Disease: A preliminary report

http://www.ento.psu.edu/MAAREC/pressReleases/FallDwindleUpdate0107.pdf

December 15, 2006

Global Research Articles by Brit Amos

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Survival Toolkit: article on Galls

Interesting article

http://waynesword.palomar.edu/pljuly99.htm

To Be Or Not To Be A Gall

The Story Of Strange Growths On Plants

Galls are caused by many organisms living on plants, including insects, mites, mistletoe, fungi and bacteria.

Table Of Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Destructive Galls 3. Galls Caused By Mistletoe 4. Fasciated Stem Galls 5. Galls Caused By Fungi 6. Galls Caused By Insects 7. Initiation Of Insect Galls 8. Spruce Pineapple Galls 9. California Jumping Galls 10. Jumping Beans Not Galls 11. The Fig Gall Controversy 12. Desert Trumpet Controversy 13. Acacia Thorn Gall Misnomer 14. Wayne's Word Gall Links 15. Wayne's Word Fig Links 16. Some References About Galls

1. Introduction

The mysterious origin of strange growths on the stems, leaves, flowers and roots of plants have intrigued naturalists for centuries. Called galls or hypertrophies, these tumorous (neoplasmic) outgrowths develop from rapid mitosis and morphogenesis of plant tissues and come in an astounding array of colors, shapes and sizes. Galls may be smooth, spiny or fuzzy, and resemble everything from marbles and ping-pong balls to dunce caps, saucers and sea urchins. Many galls provide the food and brooding structure for various species of harmless insects. Because of the general nature of galls, many authors refer to any swollen structure bearing insects as galls. This is not only incorrect, but it detracts from the marvelous evolution of some remarkable plant species which have literally developed little "condos" to house their special symbiotic insects. These help-mate insects provide a vital service to their host plant in the form of pollination or protection in a highly competitive environment where these plants could otherwise not survive.

Swollen stem galls on the branchlets of a canyon live oak (Quercus chrysolepis) caused by a cynipid gall wasp (Andricus spectabilis?).

More on link..

Faults in the Arctic Seed Vault

not everyone is celebrating Svalbard

By GRAIN

Global Research, February 27, 2008
Grain

After months of extraordinary publicity, and with the apparently unanimous
support of the international scientific community, the "Global Seed Vault" was
officially opened today on an island in Svalbard, Norway. Nestled inside a
mountain, the Vault is basically a giant icebox able to hold 4.5 million seed
samples in cold storage for humanity's future needs. The idea is that if some
major disaster hits world agriculture, such as fallout from a nuclear war,
countries could turn to the Vault to pull out seeds to restart food production.
However, this "ultimate safety net" for the biodiversity that world farming
depends on is sadly just the latest move in a wider strategy to make ex situ
(off site) storage in seed banks the dominant – indeed, only – approach to crop
diversity conservation. It gives a false sense of security in a world where the
crop diversity present in the farmers' fields continues to be eroded and
destroyed at an ever-increasing rate and contributes to the access problems that
plague the international ex situ system.

Faulty assumptions

Cary Fowler, Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and one of the main
proponents of the Vault, says that the initiative "will rescue the most globally
important developing-country collections of the world's 21 most important food
crops." While it's true that crop diversity needs to be rescued and protected,
as irreplaceable diversity is being lost at an alarming scale, relying solely on
burying seeds in freezers is no answer. The world currently has 1,500 ex situ
genebanks that are failing to save and preserve crop diversity. Thousands of
accessions have died in storage, as many have been rendered useless for lack of
basic information about the seeds, and countless others have lost their unique
characteristics or have been genetically contaminated during periodic grow-outs.
This has happened throughout the ex situ system, not just in genebanks of
developing countries. So the issue is not about being for or against genebanks,
it is about the sole reliance on one conservation strategy that, in itself, has
a lot of inherent problems.

The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage, that the
Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally unjust. It takes seeds of
unique plant varieties away from the farmers and communities who originally
created, selected, protected and shared those seeds and makes them inaccessible
to them. The logic is that as people's traditional varieties get replaced by
newer ones from research labs – seeds that are supposed to provide higher yields
to feed a growing population – the old ones have to be put away as "raw
material" for future plant breeding. This system forgets that farmers are the
world's original, and ongoing, plant breeders. To access the seeds, you have to
be integrated into a whole institutional framework that most farmers on the
planet simply don't even know about. Put simply, the whole ex situ strategy
caters to the needs of scientists, not farmers

In addition, the system operates under the assumption that once the farmers'
seeds enter a storage facility, they belong to someone else and negotiating
intellectual property and other rights over them is the business of governments
and the seed industry itself. In the case of most so-called public genebanks,
the seeds are said to become part of "the public domain" if not "national
sovereignty" (which increasingly translates to state ownership). The
Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which runs
about 15 global genebanks for the world's most widely used staple food crops,
has even set up a legal arrangement of "trusteeship" that it exercises over the
treasure chest of farmers' seeds that it holds "on behalf of" the international
community, under the auspices of the FAO. Yet they never asked the farmers whom
they took the seeds from in the first place if this was okay and they left
farmers totally out of the trusteeship equation.

The new Svalbard Vault lies squarely at the pinnacle of this faulty architecture
and false assumptions, inevitably exacerbating these problems. Because it is a
"doomsday" backup collection, it raises the stakes to new extremes. Nobody
really knows for sure if the Vault will be effective in keeping the seeds alive
and its security is untested. Just days before the opening of the Vault,
Svalbard was at the centre of the biggest earthquake in Norway's history, even
though the facility's feasibility study assured that "there is no volcanic or
significant seismic activity" in the area. But more troubling than any technical
matter is the issue of access, the keys to which are held by few hands.

Access and benefit ills

The Vault is not immune from the terrible controversies over access to and
benefits from the world's precious agricultural biodiversity. The Norwegian
government is ultimately responsible for the Vault and is currently regarded as
fair and trustworthy, but there is no guarantee that the country's policies
won't change. This is acknowledged by the Norwegian government itself, which has
provided agreements to be signed with depositors that last only ten years and
that include clauses allowing them to be terminated if policies change. Probably
more important, the Norwegian government will not be making decisions
autonomously. Decisions will be shared with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a
private entity with strong private and corporate funding.

There are already some access issues with the Vault. For all practical purposes,
seeds cannot be stored in the Vault unless they come from genebanks that have
successfully duplicated their samples in another bank. More than this,
depositors are not allowed to put in seeds that are already stored in the Vault.
The Standard Depositor Agreement states that the "Depositor shall deposit only
samples of plant genetic resources that are, to the best of the Depositor's
knowledge,.. samples of plant genetic resources that have not yet been deposited
in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault" and that "the Depositor recognizes the right
of the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food to refuse to accept
samples for deposit or to terminate the deposit of samples already deposited if
the samples constitute duplicates of materials already held in deposit in the
Svalbard Global Seed Vault".

As a rule, only depositors can access their own collections at Svalbard, or give
permission for someone else to. With parcels of CGIAR seeds already arriving in
Norway, this means that the CGIAR Centres will be the depositors for most of the
seeds held in the Vault, giving them almost exclusive control over access.
Indeed, as the Seed Vault feasibility study indicates, it was "assumed that the
[Vault] would begin operations with a nucleus consisting of the CGIAR materials
and those of certain key national genebanks and that this (sic) 'founding
collections' would discourage subsequent unnecessary duplication of materials
within the Svalbard facility." Out of the 19 depositor institutes that have
registered with the Vault so far, only three are national seed banks from
developing countries. The Vault, then, is not a safe deposit box for just
anyone. It is mostly the CGIAR's private stash.

In practical terms this means that many developing countries that want to
duplicate their collections in Svalbard would not be able to do so directly. It
would be seen as a duplicate of what the CGIAR has already deposited. They will
not, therefore, have direct access to seeds in the Vault that may have been
collected from their country. This might not seem to pose many concerns right
now because governments have different backup sources for seeds but the context
would be vastly different under any doomsday scenario where decisions would have
to be taken over a critical, unique resource which suddenly only remains in
Svalbard. For farmers there is pretty much no possibility for direct access to
seeds in the Vault.

But doomsday aside, it is important to ask who really benefits from the ex situ
system that the Vault contributes to. As the few transnational seed corporations
that control over half the world's US$30 billion annual commercial seed market
are increasingly buying up public plant breeding programmes and governments are
pulling out of plant breeding, the ultimate beneficiaries will be the very same
corporations that are at the roots of crop diversity destruction.

Stop destroying diversity instead!

If governments were truly interested in conserving biodiversity for food and
agriculture, they would do two things. First, they would, as a central priority,
focus their efforts on supporting diversity in their countries' farms and
markets rather than only betting on big centralised genebanks. This means
leaving seeds in the hand of local farmers, with their active and innovative
farming practices, respecting and promoting the rights of communities to
conserve, produce, breed, exchange and sell seeds. But this won't happen until
governments turn agricultural policy and regulations upside down and stop
pushing for industrialisation and feeding corporate-controlled global markets at
the expense of letting farmers freely feed their own communities and countries.
This means making food sovereignty the foundation of farm policy instead of
continuously pushing agriculture further down the destructive path of
corporate-led global market integration.

Svalbard is about putting diversity away, in case of some hypothetic emergency.
The real urgency, however, is to let diversity live – in farms, in the hand of
farmers, and across people-controlled and community-oriented markets – today.

Going further:

Aasa Christine Stoltz, "Norway's biggest quake hits Svalbard archipelago,"
Reuters, 21 February 2008.

http://www.reuters.com/ article/environmentNews/idUSL2173668320080221

Norwegian government and the Svalbard vault:

http://www.nordgen.org/sgsv/

Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Svalbard vault:
http://www.croptrust.org/main/arctic.php?itemid=216

International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture

http://www.planttreaty.org/

GRAIN, "The FAO seed treaty: from farmers' rights to breeders' privileges,"
Seedling, October 2005.

http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=411

Center for International Environment and Development Studies et al, "Study to
assess the feasibility of establishing a Svalbard Arctic seed depository for the
international community", prepared for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the
Ministry of Agriculture and Food, 14 September 2004.

http://www.regjeringen.no/ en/dep/lmd/campain/svalbard-global-seed-vault/
publications.html?id=463313

Svalbard Global Seed Vault – Standard Depositor Agreement.
http://www.nordgen.org/ sgsv/index.php?page=depositor_guidelines

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8218

Indigenous People Demand More Over Medicinal Plants

(an oldie but informative)

(The Monitor (Uganda) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Indigenous peoples and peasant farmers who have helped develop the world's plant genetic resources through their traditional knowledge say negotiations aimed at the commercial exploitation of plants must involve them from the very start.

But their demands have turned into a long-running dispute over sovereignty, national boundaries and ownership of knowledge. As the Curitiba meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) drew to a close in Curitiba recently, the men and women who nurture the world's biodiversity struggled to make their voices heard.

Although the Convention itself was supportive of traditional knowledge and so-called benefit sharing, many government delegations did not include members of indigenous populations. And those indigenous peoples who were able to make it to Curitiba want to maintain an independent voice that recognises their special position.

"There is a proposal to include indigenous people as part of country delegations. But there is a problem: in the Philippines there are 110 indigenous peoples groups but the government would only allow one or two onto the delegation," said Victorino Saway, a representative of the Panagtagbo people who live on Mindanao Island.

He added: "When you are part of a delegation, you speak their language. You will be controlled - your language will be controlled."

At the CBD negotiations, the issue was termed Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS), but the official title masked potentially difficult aspects relating to economics, politics and culture.

Indigenous peoples and smallholder farmers, through their traditional knowledge, innovation and practices have over centuries developed and nurtured plant species for agricultural and medicinal use, contributing not only to 'development' but also to cultural and biological diversity.

But now companies are developing medicines and crops that take advantage of these plant genetic resources.

Keen to protect their financial interests - and recoup the investment made into research and development - companies usually protect their products with patents. This means that from time to time, a new product comes on the market and reaps massive profits for the company.

Indigenous people and some developing countries with high levels of biodiversity are now demanding ownership over what they claim are their genetic resources. And they want to be part of negotiations about how these resources are used, by whom, and on what terms.

A central issue is the concept of Prior Informed Consent (PIC) - an approach supported by the CBD. "The prior informed consent of knowledge-holders must be attained before their knowledge can be used by others," the CBD says.

Saway agrees: "If prior informed consent is ignored, there will be no basis for negotiations. It provides a basis for saying yes or no to access."

Perhaps the most contentious issue surrounding ABS is that of national sovereignty. As with other international agreements signed by governments on behalf of their peoples, national sovereignty forms the very basis of the CBD.

So when an indigenous group claims knowledge of a plant, or demands to be involved in negotiations, their government can say that the knowledge belongs to the country as a whole, and will therefore be negotiated by the national government.

Sylvester Rogers from Senegal, who works for the Community Biodiversity Development Conservation Network, told the meeting: "We believe that recognition and protection of the rights of indigenous and local communities with regard to agro-biodiversity and their traditional knowledge is non-negotiable and integral to any strategies and efforts towards the sustainable management and use of biodiversity."

Without that recognition and protection, he said, the utilisation of biodiversity will be nothing more than economic and commercial transactions, reducing indigenous people and local communities to "mere vendors of biological resources without respect to deeply held spiritual, cultural and socio-economic connections to the earth and biodiversity."

Indigenous people have a powerful backer in Tewolde Egziabher, an Ethiopian environmentalist and scientist who heads the African Group at CBD negotiations. He supports an international regime which includes PIC and certificates of origin of knowledge.

Such a regime, some campaigners say, would not only lead to fair and equitable sharing of the world's biological wealth, but also result in fewer patent disputes, some of which have grabbed headlines in recent years.

One such case involved the Hoodia plant, which pitted the San population of southern Africa - supported by a coalition of NGOs - against western and other pharmaceutical firms.

The Hoodia is a succulent plant - found in the Kalahari Desert - that can suppress appetite, and could potentially be used as an anti-obesity drug.

The plant's active ingredient was patented by a South African research institute in the late 1990s. It gave a license to a British company, which in turn sold additional development and marketing licenses to Pfizer, the multinational drug company, and the food giant Unilever.

After a protracted dispute, a deal was struck with the South African research institute in 2003 whereby the San people of South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Angola would receive a percentage of the royalties from the sales of any future drugs produced from their knowledge of the Hoodia plant.

The San based their claims on a CBD provision, which says should get a share of benefits resulting from the commercial use of local genetic resources and traditional knowledge. But there are countless examples where indigenous populations have lost out, as Ujalla Masdik, an Indian campaigner, reminded the conference.

She referred to a case involving an energy-giving plant used by Kani tribal people in the southern Indian state of Kerala. "Discovered" accidentally by members of an Indian scientific expedition in the early 1990s, the plant, known by the Kani as arogyapacha, was tested by a local research institute.

The institute then obtained a license from the Kerala Drug Control Department to produce and market a tonic based on the plant. It was named Jeevani (derived from the Sanskrit word meaning 'life').

The product was patented in 1996, following which the research institute transferred the production license to a local drug manufacturer. Although the Kani Trust received half the license fee and royalty, they were not involved in the negotiations.

"Some countries have made local or national laws about indigenous people, but others don't recognise them, or say 'we are all indigenous people'," said Saway of the Philippines.

Saway and his colleagues, working in the Mount Kitanglad region of the Philippines, have drawn up an inventory of plants based on their traditional knowledge, which the community "claims as our own".

As a precaution, the inventory has been written in the community's language and the plants' uses have not been explained. "We also have our cultural guards who will apprehend anyone taking our customary rights without our consent," he added.

The biotechnology industry, the usual target of attacks by NGOs and activists working on biodiversity issues, backs an access and benefit sharing system that is workable and provides value for use of genetic resources.

Alwin Kopse, a spokesman for the biotech corporation, Syngenta, said he supported national regimes that were "practical and transparent". Certificates of origin, he said, might be easier to obtain for products derived directly from plants, rather than those that were indirectly derived.

Another problem with issuing certificates of origin, Kopse said, was that certain genetic resources are shared across different countries or indigenous peoples. "What we want is a workable benefits access regime" - one that is not loaded with technocratic stamps, which, he argued "may turn out to be costly".

He accepted that the industry should now be prepared to pay for access to genetic resources but said Syngenta prefers to offer "other benefits" rather than hard cash.

If the CBD protocol on access and benefit sharing is to work, Kopse pointed out, it would be important to define the nature of benefits and who should receive them - a complex set of issues in his view.

Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media. (allafrica.com)