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This chapter addresses the issues of equity in a world divided by economic wealth and poverty, uneven distribution, trade of genetic resources and ownership of these resources as intellectual property. The increasing value of crop resources that resulted from the rise of formal crop breeding, the diffusion of modern varieties, and the availability of plant breeders' rights in the twentieth century spurred a movement to clarify ownership of genetic resources and broaden the pool of people who benefit from their availability and use. The chapter discusses that this movement resulted in the Convention on Biological Diversity and the International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. It also reveals that while the charge of biopiracy is still commonly voiced, the benefits of open access to crop resources in an international public domain are now more fully recognized.

Bitter Roots introduces an innovative new way to think about drug discovery from plants within a transnational perspective. It historicizes the process of drug discovery for each plant in a “metaphorical family of bitter roots” through the testing of popular accounts of innovation gleaned from oral testimonies, scientific articles, and product labels. To compare how people engaged in a common method for bringing traditional medicine into the laboratory, it proposes a schematic of five basic practices used by both scientists and healers. It uses competing narratives for how healers, scientists and others created records, experiments, explanations, products, and harvests to examine differing claims to priority, locality, appropriation, and benefits for each species. Herbal medicine and pharmaceutical chemistry are therefore “coproduced” and have mutually supportive histories spanning continents and centuries. Rereading pharmacological discoveries across nations reveals the interplay between medical lineages and ultimately the multiple benefactors of our intellectual inheritance.

Colonial botanists in the British colony of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in West Africa, stole plants and information in their quest to manufacture a new drug for ‘smoker’s heart’, sold by companies like a precursor to Bristol Myers Squibb. It begins with the history of arrow poison technology in West Africa, and explains how colonial subjects resisted government efforts to control valuable plants. The chapter then addresses how colonial scientists tried to export Strophanthus hispidus, the key ingredient in both arrow poisons and the drug. It explains how in the Gold Coast, people continued to use the plant on arrows, even though it was banned, and fearing for their safety, colonial officials opted to dig up and burn plants in experimental gardens. The chapter uses this case study to explore how people fashion boundaries between science and non-science, expertise and non-expertise, and the implications for intellectual property law.

The colonial era witnessed a fevered quest for exotic medicinal plants by European physicians and scientists. This chapter explores the geographical principles that oriented the search towards the lands and peoples of the humid tropics. Believing that God had planted botanical cures for diseases in their places of origin, and that the tropical sun intensified the healing power of plants, medicinal plant collectors concentrated their efforts in the pestilential equatorial latitudes. Although many subscribed to the ancient Doctrine of Signatures, they discovered early that indigenous people represented storehouses of healing plant knowledge. Assuming that native know-how constituted more instinct than intelligence, Europeans employed coercion, bribes, torture, and promises of freedom to extract their ethnomedical secrets. In the case of especially lucrative healing plants, such as Jesuit’s bark (the source of quinine), imperial and colonial biopirates conspired to pilfer and naturalize endemic species in their distant colonies. In the process, colonial agents set in motion a grand experiment in useful species homogenization, the ecological and cultural impacts of which is still being felt in today’s Anthropocene.

This chapter critiques three particular patents cases in the US and EU that were filed in the 1990s by Indian NGOs and the Indian government. The three patents in question were related to neem, turmeric, and basmati. All three cases caused outrage in India because of the perception that the West was ‘stealing’ traditional knowledge from India. This chapter explains the rhetoric and misinformation surrounding all three cases and explores how the media and the government dealt with these issues at a time when awareness about patent law in India was low. These three cases were followed by the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). This chapter explores and critiques the rationale for the TKDL and its efficacy in achieving its stated goals.

Rosa Luxemburg argues that capital accumulation has a dual character: One concerns the commodity market and the place where surplus value is produced–the factory, the mine, the agricultural estate. Regarded in this light accumulation is a purely economic process, with its most important phase a transaction between the capitalist and the wage labourer. . . . Here, in form at any rate, peace, property and equality prevail, and the keen dialectics of scientific analysis were required to reveal how the right of ownership changes in the course of accumulation into appropriation of other people’s property, how commodity exchange turns into exploitation, and equality becomes class rule. The other aspect of the accumulation of capital concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start making their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loan system–a policy of spheres of interest–and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process. These two aspects of accumulation, she argues, are ‘organically linked’ and ‘the historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking them together’. Luxemburg rests her analysis upon a particular understanding of the crisis tendencies of capitalism. The problem, she argues, is underconsumption, a general lack of sufficient effective demand to soak up the growth in output that capitalism generates. This difficulty arises because workers are exploited and by definition receive much less value to spend than they produce, and capitalists are at least in part obliged to reinvest rather than to consume. After due consideration of various ways in which the supposed gap between supply and effective demand might be bridged, she concludes that trade with non-capitalist social formations provides the only systematic way to stabilize the system. If those social formations or territories are reluctant to trade then they must be compelled to do so by force of arms (as happened with the opium wars in China).