Neotribal entrepreneurialism and the commodification of biodiversity: WIPO's displacement of development for private property rights

ABSTRACT

It is becoming difficult to justify fears around biopiracy due to contemporary developments, which would see the inclusion of those previously marginalized by modernization. The World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) role in this is central. WIPO seeks to bypass the state by negotiating the developmental aspirations of local communities via the alienation of Traditional Knowledge (TK). The new developmental strategy diverges from strategies of redistribution by privatizing returns from bioprospecting to select contractual partners. The WIPO TK Report facilitates this by reconstructing TK holders as owners of alienable assets. However, what underlies this incorporation of reconstructed ‘premoderns’ is the unspoken belief around modernization that poverty is the inevitable lot of premoderns who are yet to be incorporated into global capitalism. However, WIPO's discursive construction of the ‘premodern’ development aspirant is achieved by excluding displaced identities. WIPO's bioprospecting agreements demand that signatories have delimited identities. Hence exclusivity ensures that revenues are not dissipated amongst an unknown number of people who could claim entitlements to commercial returns. The workability of a contract is achieved by the exclusion of creolized identities inscribed by modernization's displacement. This has dire implication for biodiversity-dependent poor communities whose livelihood strategies are shaped in response to displacement.

KEYWORDS:

• Bioprospecting
• benefit-sharing
• governmentality
• post-development
• subsistence
• ‘Intellectual Property Rights’