African countries call for sanctions as UN nears treaty on ‘biopiracy’

The UN has been working for decades on a treaty to prevent the exploitation of genetic resources.

A group of African nations has called for a sanctions regime as talks have opened on a landmark treaty aimed at putting an end to “biopiracy”.

The United Nations opened the debate on Monday in Geneva with a view to finalising the treaty, which aims to prevent the plundering of genetic resources and traditional knowledge surrounding them.

After more than 20 years of negotiations, the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) hopes to conclude an agreement that will protect such knowledge from exploitation by enforcing greater transparency in the patenting system.

The draft treaty text says patent applicants would be required to disclose which country the genetic resources in an invention came from and who the Indigenous people are who provided the associated traditional knowledge.

While natural genetic resources, such as those found in medicinal plants, crops and animal breeds, cannot be directly protected as international property, inventions developed using them can be.