There’s No Such Thing as Biopiracy… And It’s A Good Thing Too - SSRN, August 2005

Excerpt: Tales of northern exploitation of biological wealth and ethnobiological knowledge from the global south have become so frequent, so familiar, and so uniform that allegations of biopiracy now follow a predictable script. I come not to praise the biopiracy narrative, but to bury it. Most allegations of biopiracy are so thoroughly riddled with inconsistencies and outright lies that the entire genre, pending further clarification, must be consigned to the realm of rural legend. Despite its implausibility, however, accusations of biopiracy set the rhetorical baseline in many debates within the international law of environmental protection and intellectual property. The time has come to dismantle the myth of biopiracy root and branch.

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