Bioprospecting--the exchange of plants for corporate promises of
royalties or community development assistance--has been lauded as a way
to develop new medicines while offering southern nations and indigenous
communities an incentive to preserve their rich biodiversity. But can
pharmaceutical profits really advance conservation and indigenous
rights? How much should companies pay and to whom? Who stands to gain
and lose? The first anthropological study of the practices mobilized in
the name and in the shadow of bioprospecting, this book takes us into
the unexpected sites where Mexican scientists and American companies
venture looking for medicinal plants and local knowledge.
Cori Hayden tracks bioprospecting's contentious new promise--and the
contradictory activities generated in its name. Focusing on a contract
involving Mexico's National Autonomous University, Hayden examines the
practices through which researchers, plant vendors, rural collectors,
indigenous cooperatives, and other actors put prospecting to work. By
paying unique attention to scientific research, she provides a key to
understanding which people and plants are included in the promise of
"selling biodiversity to save it"--and which are not. And she considers
the consequences of linking scientific research and rural
"enfranchisement" to the logics of intellectual property.
Roving across UN protocols, botanical collecting histories, Mexican
nationalist agendas, neoliberal property regimes, and North-South
relations, When Nature Goes Public charts the myriad, emergent publics
that drive and contest the global market in biodiversity and its
futures.
