Abstract:
Indigenous people and their socio-cultural relationships with biological systems have largely been contributing to sustainable conservation of biodiversity, especially in in-situ conservation. Some international developments in the environment and conservation scene have opened avenues for introducing measures to recognize and protect Indigenous Peoples knowledge. This has given impetus to international treaties like the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) whose main objective is to sustain and preserve the biological diversity around the world. Article 8(j) of the convention safeguards the knowledge, innovations and practices and encourages the equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilization of such knowledge, innovations and practices to indigenous people. ILO convention 169 is another treaty that closely relates indigenous and tribal peoples with biodiversity conservation. Nepal is signatory to both CBD and ILO 169, according to which member countries are obliged to protect rights of Indigenous Peoples and their knowledge.
In order to establish rights of Indigenous people in genetic resources, the dominance of Trade Related Intellectual Property rights (TRIPs) has been playing hindering roles. In the TRIPs concept, knowledge is generated for commercial benefits from laboratory research which cost resources and hence the person or institution developing knowledge should have rights on use of the knowledge. Therefore, TRIPs always looks for knowledge developer and a right on knowledge, as patent, is provided to the knowledge developer.
The study has put forward three ways to provide rights of knowledge to Indigenous People. Firstly, by mixing CBD and TRIPs; this has been practiced in Canada and some other countries, but it could be complex in the Nepalese context. Establishing new institution representing traditional knowledge holder would be the first challenge, which will be followed by other issues like developing new products through scientific research. Secondly, it could be done by establishing protocol under CBD 8(j). The issue has been floating as a debate in international level, but, unless and until this is materialized, indigenous people should follow the development in international level and take necessary steps to protect and use their knowledge through activities recommended in the report. Third and the most appropriate method in the context of Nepal would be developing sui generis (locally applicable national legislation) from national legislation for commercialization of potential products for the benefit of communities and indigenous people. At present, power and modality of federal and local government have been in discussion for formulation of new constitution, so it is the right time to incorporate biodiversity conservation related rights of indigenous people in new constitution so that successive national policy, acts frameworks can be developed accordingly.
To develop national sui generis system, we need to verify the available resources, their commercial potential, and resource protection including management modality adopted by indigenous people. Answer to all these core issues demand knowledge on status of indigenous people on biodiversity conservation. Documentation of indigenous knowledge, practices and skills of all 59 or more indigenous nationalities in Nepal is costly and time consuming process. Moreover, the documentation should be done with the initiation or with the consent of Indigenous Peoples, so that the resources can be mobilized from various sources. This will in the long run help to avoid others from claiming knowledge, practice and skills owned by Indigenous Peoples.
As part of the research, a case study was done in the Dura Community in Duradanda of Lamjung District. The community has a glorious past, but they were a lost community for a long period of time and they were only first included in 2001 Census. The Duradanda is rich in biodiversity and they have long been using herbs as medicinal plants for treating and curing diseases. Lately, only few, particularly senior natives can identify the plants and know how to prepare it for medicinal purposes. The knowledge they possess is not available in written form and is exacerbating due to lack of documentation. In addition, easy availability and effectiveness of allopathic and Ayurvedic medicines have forced them to abandon their traditional use of medicinal plants. Thus, documentation is necessary to protect their knowledge from extinction and preserve it for future potential benefits.
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