People, Plants and Patents: The impact of intellectual property on biodiversity, conservation, trade and rural society

People, Plants, and Patents examines intellectual property and the patenting of life forms as bluntly and as fairly as possible. People, Plants, and Patents helps to identify the major points and the rangeof policy alternatives in this extraordinarily important, fast-changing, and politicized field.

Decisions about intellectual property, particularly for plant life, have major implications for food security, agriculture, rural development, & the environment for every country in the world. For the developing world, in particular, the impact of intellectual property on farmers, rural societies, & biological diversity will be profoundly important. This book identifies the major issues & the range of policy alternatives in this extraordinarily important, fast-changing, & politicized field.

Legal control and ownership of plants and traditional knowledge of the uses of plants (TKUP) is a vexing issue. The phenomenon of appropriation of plants and TKUP, otherwise known as biopiracy, thrives in a cultural milieu where non-Western forms of knowledge are systemically marginalized and devalued as "folk knowledge" or characterized as inferior. Global Biopiracy rethinks the role of international law and legal concepts, the Western-based, Eurocentric patent systems of the world, and international agricultural research institutions as they affect legal ownership and control of plants and TKUP.

Native to the Kalahari Desert, Hoodia gordonii is a succulent plant known by generations of Indigenous San peoples to have a variety of uses: to reduce hunger, increase energy, and ease breastfeeding. In the global North, it is known as a natural appetite suppressant, a former star of the booming diet industry. In Reinventing Hoodia, Laura Foster explores how the plant was reinvented through patent ownership, pharmaceutical research, the self-determination efforts of Indigenous San peoples, contractual benefit sharing, commercial development as an herbal supplement, and bioprospecting legislation. Using a feminist decolonial technoscience approach, Foster argues that although patent law is inherently racialized, gendered, and Western, it offered opportunities for Indigenous San peoples, South African scientists, and Hoodia growers to make unequal claims for belonging within the shifting politics of South Africa. This radical interdisciplinary and intersectional account of the multiple materialities of Hoodia illuminates the co-constituted connections between law, science, and the marketplace, while demonstrating how these domains value certain forms of knowledge and matter differently.