Protecting Indigenous Knowledge against Biopiracy in the Andes

Sustaining Local Food Systems, Agricultural Biodiversity and Livelihoods project

For centuries Andean communities have been pillaged for profit by outsiders, and despite recent
progress in recognising the rights of indigenous people, these same communities are now dealing
with a powerful new modern threat: biopiracy. Laws designed to protect the ‘intellectual
property rights’ of inventors are being abused to deprive the rightful owners of generations of
innovative plant breeding of the fruits of their labour.
This paper presents the Indigenous Biocultural Heritage Register, an approach developed by Andean communities in Peru in order to protect their knowledge against biopiracy and gain legal rights relating over their knowledge. The main objective of the register is to ensure the conservation, protection and promotion of indigenous peoples’ knowledge systems for sustaining their livelihoods and traditional resource rights. The Indigenous Biocultural Heritage Register, based on traditional Andean science and technology, also uses modern tools for collecting, documenting, storing, and administering the contents of the register.