Poor nations urged to protect traditional knowledge

Kenya should develop laws which ensure traditional knowledge held by various ethnic groups benefits them first even when that knowledge is commercialised, experts now say.

“Control of bio-diversity should be based on communities. The benefits which come with traditional knowledge should benefit the community first before it serves commercial interests,” Marsden Momanyi, the spokesperson of African Technology Policy Studies Network.

In the current arrangement the person or company that patents the knowledge takes all the commercial gains.

The new calls comes in the wake of revelations that the UN agency responsible for safeguarding the rights of communities to benefit from intellectual property is encouraging a model that suits commercial interests.

In Kenya, like most African countries, traditional knowledge belongs to the ethnic group and was shared freely to ensure that it benefited all.

For instance, knowledge of what plants have medicinal value was not confined to one person. But if a drug manufacturer stumbles upon such knowledge and patents the formula, he takes all the monetary benefits.

New research by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) warns that communities the world over risk losing control over their traditional knowledge because World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) insists on using existing intellectual property standards for managing access to the information.

The report says the model of safeguarding intellectual property rights advocated by WIPO “is a flawed approach as has been created on Western commercial lines,” said IIED’s Krystyna Swiderska who co-ordinated the research in Kenya and several Asia and Latin America countries.

The report says that traditional communities tend to protect knowledge and resources in entirely the opposite way, meaning that ideas and life-forms cannot be privatised and that access to them remains non-exclusive.

This ensures access to knowledge held by others which is essential for survival in often harsh environments.

The report warns that the loss of such customary approaches would lead to a lack of biological diversity and traditional knowledge which would limit the abilities of poor communities to adapt to climate change through, for instance, sharing climate-resilient plant varieties.

The research was conducted in India, China, Panama, Peru and Kenya, which stressed that ancestral rights to control knowledge cannot be extinguished, even if knowledge has been shared with others, because of its vital role in survival and identity.

In Kenya, the study was conducted among the Masai and the Mijikenda ethnic groups.

The findings are in line with concerns by local herbal medicine practitioners who told Business Daily that fear of theft of traditional knowledge is restricting them from disclosing their findings some of which could end up treating and successfully managing life threatening diseases.

The failure to come up with a way of assuring the practitioners that their knowledge will not be stolen, patented and end up benefiting only one person or company has also meant delay in integration of traditional and conventional medicine in provision of primary health care.