Biopiracy is the appropriation of genetic resources or traditional knowledge without the providers' prior informed consent or fair benefit-sharing, often followed by patenting or commercial use that excludes the people who developed or kept the resource.
In practice
The term is used both legally, where a country's access rules or the Nagoya Protocol were breached, and ethically, for practices that are technically legal but unfair. In cannabis, critics point to landrace seed collected without permission, renamed and sold with no credit to its origin, and to patents built on traits that traditional growers had selected for generations.
GenetixBay's view is firm: responsible landrace hunting and biopiracy are different things. Consent, documentation, credit and compensation make the difference. See landrace hunting and biopiracy.
Rules differ by country, state, province and city, and change often. This is a general definition, not legal advice: check local rules.
Don't confuse with
- Bioprospecting: searching for useful genetic resources; it becomes biopiracy when consent and benefit-sharing are missing.
- Landrace hunting: can be done responsibly.
Germplasm is living genetic material (seeds, pollen, tissue or plants) kept for breeding, research or conservation, representing the genetic diversity of a crop.Prior informed consent is permission given in advance, with full information about intended use, by a country or community before its genetic resources or knowledge are accessed.Benefit-sharing is returning a fair share of the benefits from using genetic resources or traditional knowledge, money, credit, access or support, to the people who provided them.The Nagoya Protocol is a 2010 international treaty under the Convention on Biological Diversity governing access to genetic resources and fair sharing of their benefits.A landrace is a traditional, locally adapted cannabis population kept by farmers in one region over many generations, with its own type and plenty of internal variation.A landrace hunter travels to cannabis-growing regions to collect seed from local farmer populations, ideally with consent, credit and benefit-sharing for source communities.A utility patent protects a new, useful and non-obvious invention; for plants it can cover varieties, seeds, specific traits or breeding and processing methods.
