“From huts to labs and back again: stimulating the production of biodiversity-based drugs while ensuring an equitable sharing of the benefits flowing thereby”

The beneficial properties of the Azadirachta Indica, commonly known as the Indian neem tree, have been known and employed by Indian farmers for centuries and yet only a few decades ago they have attracted the interests of foreign biotech and pharma companies. At the beginning of the seventies, many biologists and etnobotanists moved to India to investigate neem trees’ attributes and the fruits of their work, entirely based on local germ plasm and knowledge, led to the patenting of a several range of products, from pesticides to toothpaste. Needless to say, not a single penny went to Indian farmers or to the Indian Government . The neem tree is probably the most well-known case of biopiracy – better defined as biosquatting -- but unfortunately is not the only one . Developed countries’ companies have recently come to understand the immeasurable value of the biodiversity that indigenous communities, mainly located in Developing Countries, have carefully studied and cherished across centuries . Moreover, they have come to acknowledge the value of the so called traditional knowledge associated with it . This work is composed of four parts. The first chapter is aimed at analyzing the current scenario of (international) legal provisions dealing with the use of traditional knowledge. The second part presents an overview of the current state of the debate, examining the most recent proposals advanced within the WIPO and other international fora. The third part of this work is meant to analyze how and to what extent modern intellectual property systems, shaped to preserve the interests of an industrial society, are likely preserve the interests of Developed Countries, to the damage of Developing ones.The last part of the work concentrates, on the one side, on recent proposals advanced in order to grant indigenous communities some sort of entitlement towards their tangible and intangible knowledge and, on the other side, on the possibility of reestablishing the local working requirement within patent law as an instrument to protect indigenous communities against the commercial exploitation of traditional knowledge based –patents in their own territories.