Word: tribalization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Developing nations from Venezuela to Thailand say they are feeling like chumps and are moving to better protect their indigenous communities and wildlife from what they call "biocolonialism" or "biopiracy." The governments are drafting strict laws to ensure that the world's 300 million mostly poor tribal people share in the wealth that their knowledge helps create. One of the newer strategies is for governments or indigenous communities to obtain commercial patent rights on medicines and other products divined in animals and plants before the labs can muscle in. (None of the new laws are retroactive.) They also hope...
Drug corporations warn that tribal royalties could raise prescription-drug costs in countries like the U.S., where those costs already are a hot political issue. That's one reason (in addition to the campaign cash showered on Washington by drugmakers) the Bush Administration opposes the idea. It points to a World Trade Organization ruling that excludes commercial rights for traditional knowledge that is later engineered into medicines or genetically developed foods. But at the December intellectual-property meeting in Geneva, indigenous groups plan to cite the U.N.'s 1992 Convention on Biodiversity, which concedes to developing nations the right...
...growing dispute may sour the drug industry's appetite for rain-forest research and development. Abbott, for example, irked by tribal claims, denies that a poison-dart frog had anything to do with its new pain-killer (which is in clinical trials) other than inspiring the company to take a closer look at a similar group of synthetic compounds. Says a spokeswoman for another major U.S. firm: "We've started scaling back. We just don't think you can define 'traditional knowledge' in that kind of legalistic way." Others fear that, given the notorious corruption of many Third World governments...
...having been in Australia for 40,000 years or more, in contrast to the whites' 200 or less, the Aborigines were not giving up. So the policy changed to assimilation. First, the Aborigines were deprived of their nomadic tribal life and concentrated in "mission stations," communities run mainly by Protestant evangelists, where they were taught the Gospels, shown white ways and prepared for low-level jobs as servants...
...Some 700 land claims, covering 50% of the Australian landmass, await determination by the courts, and more are coming in every day. This avalanche has caused legal and bureaucratic gridlock. Few Aboriginal groups accept mediation by whites. No two groups agree on land use. Some, for instance, think that tribal land should not be exploited at all, and left sacrosanct. Others are for all-out mining...