For centuries, Indian housewives have used homemade remediesbased on cow's milk to cure constipation -- but in 2009 Swiss giant Nestle appliedfor a patent to protect a similar product of its own.
Earlier this year, India successfully fought off Nestle'sattempt at the European Patent Office (EPO) to secure a patent, saying thatusing cow's milk as a laxative was mentioned in ancient texts and was thereforenot new.
Indian government officials are fighting hundreds of othercases to try to protect the country's “genetic heritage”, a topic high on theagenda at the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity currently meeting inHyderabad.
“India is one of the mega centres for biodiversity in theworld,” said Vinod Bhatt, director of research at Navdanya, a non-profit bodythat seeks to promote indigenous knowledge.
“We cannot allow theft of our traditional knowledge thatdates back thousands of years and is rooted in our culture. We have to protectourselves from commercial exploitation by the Western world,” Bhatt told AFP.
Traditional knowledge, used for centuries by indigenouscommunities under local laws and customs, plays an important role in areas suchas food security, biodiversity, agriculture and medicine.
“Nestle is just one case. We have already succeeded in 110,and 800 more are in the pipeline,” said Vinod Kumar Gupta, the head of India'sTraditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL).
The library is a digital database established in 2001 torecord 250,000 traditional formulations, including the Hindu “ayurvedic” systemof medicine that has become hugely popular in the West.
“Every known medicinal plant in India is under piracyattack,” said Gupta, citing an example where a US patent application was madeby Britain-based firm Provexis on the use of banana extracts as treatment fordiarrhoea.
Evidence from the TKDL proved the banana preparation waspreviously well-known, and the application was withdrawn.
In the cow's milk case, the European patent authorities alsosought advice from the database, which confirmed it was a remedy -- often mixedwith other ingredients -- to treat constipation for hundreds of years.
A patent application is normally rejected if there is “priorexisting knowledge” about the product, but that is far easier to prove if theinformation is published in a journal or on a database, rather than only heldin folklore.
Some 200 researchers took eight years to create the TKDLdatabase, combing through Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and Urdu texts onayurveda, yoga and other less-known health systems such as unani and siddha.
The TKDL is accessible to foreign patent offices, which canconsult it before deciding whether to grant exclusive rights to applicants.
India woke up to the threat of what is now termed“bio-piracy” 20 years ago after a European patent was granted to a US group onan anti-fungal product derived from the native Indian “neem” tree.
Outraged campaigners and Green Party politicians in Europechallenged its validity, and India finally won a 10-year legal battle in 2000to have the patent revoked as neem seeds had been used for centuries as amedicine, insecticide and contraceptive.
In 2009, the EPO also withdrew another patent granted to aSpanish company for the use of melon extract to treat the skin disease vitiligoon the same legal grounds.
The practical effect of patents may in reality have littleimpact in villages of India, where plants, trees and other natural products arestill widely used to treat maladies.
But the patents provoke an angry response from thegovernment, which sees protecting knowledge of traditional Indian medicine fromforeign commercial exploitation as a matter of national pride.
Legal battles between the TKDL and global firms over patentrequests can take years to resolve and require exhaustive documentation by theagency's researchers to prove prior art references.
"We don't see any short-term problems of bio-piracy butwe've got to be watchful of the long-term implications," said Bhatt of Navdanya.
Scientists and lawyers agree countries such as India must bemore vigilant.
"Between 1992 and 2000 China revised its patent lawstwice to ensure that it could draw intellectual property control over itsunique system of medicine," Devinder Sharma, an agriculture scientist andbiodiversity expert, told AFP.
He said similar legislation must be put in place in India.
"Instead of chasing 'bio-pirates' here and there, wecould rest easy in the knowledge that we are legally protected," he said.
Lawyers backed Sharma's idea and called for comprehensivelaws to provide better protection from the international patents.
"Traditional knowledge falls into the grey area and isnot as clearly defined as intellectual property rights in Indian law,"Pratiush Pratik, a New Delhi-based lawyer who specialises in the subject, toldAFP.
Western societies have accepted the loss of traditionalknowledge, he said. "India must not make that mistake."
