School of Social and Political Science

Description

The emerging field of ethnobiotechnology seeks to develop a new paradigm in biotechnology, one that does not exploit but rather works with the caretakers of the world’s endangered and endemic biodiversity in the pursuit of sustainable and equitable development. With its emphasis on new knowledge (a requirement of patents), modern biotechnology tends to ignore traditional knowledge developed and sustained by local and indigenous communities over generations. Scientists working under the biotechnology paradigm tend to extract traditional knowledge and raw plant material from people and forests in biodiversity-rich tropical countries, patenting them as new in their countries without acknowledging the sources of their knowledge. Hans Sloane obtained a patent for making chocolate in 1687; yet the people from the Caribbean who shared their knowledge and plants with him remain nameless. More recently, research in biotechnology has been associated with the genetic modification of organisms and gene editing. Treated as a natural science, this form of biotechnology gleans little or no insight from Indigenous Studies, Development Studies, and other relevant fields in the social sciences and humanities. As with Sloan’s early biotechnology, the ultimate ends of this kind of research are the development of patents for new products such as foodstuffs, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. This paper aims to show how the science of biotechnology can be made compatible with the desires and needs of indigenous and local communities in the tropical biodiversity ‘hotspots’ of the world, with lessons shared from decades of ethnobiotechnology research in Jamaica.

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