permaculture

[Pacific Edge Permaculture + Media <pacedge@magna.com.au>]

> From: 1earth permaculture <permaculture1@start.com.au>
> Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2001 8:37:12 +1000
> Subject: Re: plants DB - indigenious
> 
> I had a chat with an Australian Aboriginal elder yesterday, which
> might be worth sharing on this List. The Plants DB came up and her
> response was:
> 
> There is one specific native plant she mentioned that has some amazing
> medicinal properties, which the aborigines have been using for
> centuries. It is extremely hardy and can grow almost anywhere. They
> dare not mention the plant to most white folk for fear that the plant
> will be commercialised, patented, fought over, synthesized and sold
> over the chemist counter. As she said, that's not the plant's purpose.

This makes the assumption that all 'white folk'  would behave in this way,
which they would not. It seems, on information supplied, that this woman was
generalising about 'white folk' the same way many Australians of European
origin generalise about Aboriginies.

> She requested that the plant not be mentioned on a public domain
> database.
> 
> Marcus

I encountered this attitude with an Aboriginal education officer employed by
a major Australian botanical institution. We were discussing some bush foods
and medicines he had on display at a show. One of the plants, he said, was
used medicinally. He could not tell me (or any non-Aboriginal) about it,
though, because he had made an agreement not to.

His reason was that commercial interests might develop a pharmaceutical from
the plant and that Aboriginals would not be compensated for passing on their
traditional knowledge. I am aware that there are plenty of precedents for
this elsewhere in the world and, probably, in Australia.

In an economic sense, the practice of treating traditional knowledge - such
as that discovered and developed by indigenous peoples - as 'free goods' is
clearly unfair and unjust . It flies in the face of the market economic
proposition of paying for services at the market rate as well as the moral
precept of fairly rewarding people for sharing something of theirs that will
benefit the common good.

After discussing the issue further with the education officer, I realised:

1) information about medicinal uses of Australian bush plants is already
available in anthropological and ethnobotanical literature

2) the information is also available in books published for plant
enthusiasts, such as Cribb's 'Medicinal Plants' (Angus and Robertson,
Sydney, 1981) and Lassack and McCarthy's 'Australian Medicinal Plants'
(Mandarin Books, Melbourne, 1990).

Unless the information was unknown to researchers, the action to exclude
non-Aboriginies was taken too late to achieve its purpose. No doubt, there
are medicinal plants unknown to researchers but known to Aboriginal
populations of particular areas - that is why ethnobotanical teams from
overseas have been grated permission to scour the Australian flora for
potential pharmaceuticals in recent times.


WIDER ISSUES..........
There are wider issues than fair recompense for traditional knowledge at
stake here, however, and I feel they must be discussed in any more or less
objective assessment of the exclusion of non-Aboriginies (or by other
indigenous peoples) from traditional knowledge, although they might offend
the politically correct and advocates of rights for indigenous peoples.

'OPEN' AND 'CLOSED' SOCIETIES
>From anthropology I have picked up the notions of 'open'  and 'closed'
societies. Open societies are those, commonly found in Western civilisation,
where the notion of information as common property underlies thinking -
where access to information is the ethos.

Yes, I know that critics of this notion will quickly (and justifiably) point
out that commercial/  corporate interests trademark, patent and copyright
property, effectively privatising it. It can be argued by those supportive
of conventional commercial practice that businesses do, however, share
proprietry knowledge in the form of products, thus making it available to
those who can afford it or, in the case of the Australian government's
subsidy of medicinal drugs, making available access to expensive
pharmaceuticals through subsidy. Where people are unable to pay for the
product, the recent success in forcing corporations to reduce the price or
to distribute freely AIDS drugs in Africa offers hope.

Closed societies, by my understanding, have a practice of treating
traditional information as private, not for sharing. This could be seen as
tantamount to the corporate practice of locking-up information or
privatising it, with the difference that the information is not converted
into a product. This effectively excludes people not of the same ethnic/
cultural/  tribal origin from benefiting from that knowledge.

THE COMMON GOOD
A consequence of excluding others from critical information is that it never
serves the broader 'common good', such as a traditional medicine useful in
fighting disease has potential for or as corporate knowledge made
commercially available as affordable pharmaceuticals would do.

Advocates of maintaining exclusive cultural/  ethnic/  tribal rights to
traditional knowledge might say that this is the right of the cultural group
in question. In reality, it is. Yet, there remains the contradiction of
those groups sharing in the availability of conventional pharamaceuticals
through medical services while declining to share their cultural property
with people outside the culture whose health would benefit from it.

I have been brought up with the notion that the common good should prevail
over private interests, and with all the suffering in the world - much of it
treatable through pharmaceuticals and medicinal plants of whatever origin -
I am troubled by the notion of medicinal exclusivity whether of corporate or
tradtitional origin. I know that this will annoy people who place ethnic/
cultural considerations first, but it is a personal attitude that probably
has much to do with my being a product of Western civilisation.

PLANT DATABASES
So, how do developers of plant databases deal with the question of
indigenous pharmaceutical knowledge?

Given that many pharmaceuticals have been developed from plants that could
be considered the traditional knowledge of particular peoples, that many
plants useable straight from the garden have medicinal properties even
without or with minimal processing such as might be done in the home, and
that the probability is that  these people have never been adequately
recompensed for sharing their knowledge, are these species to be left off a
database?

How do we ascribe property rights to traditional knowledge? Is a plant used
by, say, Germanic or English peoples their own property or the collective
property of the civilisation (Western civilisation) of which they are a
part?

How do medicinal herbs as the property of a particular culture affect their
use by herbal practitioners? Do they pay royalties to someone?

In Australia, do we forego the use of eucalyptus oil and tea tree oil
because the plants might have been used by Aboriginal peoples? What about
macadamia nuts as food? Or what if the strongly lemon-flavoured tea tree on
the NSW north coast, shown to me by an ethnobotanist, were developed
commercially as a food flavour?  We would have to do a detailed search of
the anthropological literature to find out if any of these plants were used
traditionally by Aboriginal peoples.

I raise these points not in an antagonistic way but to take a broader view
of such issues than that normally afforded by the advocates of exclusive and
private cultural knowledge or exclusive and private corporate knowledge. I
also raise them as an advocate of sharing knowledge for the greater good,
providing that the developers of the knowledge benefit from its sharing.

...Russ Grayson