A BIO-CULTURAL CRITIQUE OF THE CBD AND ABS
PART I / CHAPTER 1
Some of the ABS agreements reached between communities
The commodification of TK can also lead to situations of
and commercial interests are very similar to commercial sale
desperate exchange in which ILCs dispossessed of their lands
agreements, and in this case, it is TK that is being sold.
and culturally marginalized are left with little choice than to
The emergence of TK as a tradable commodity disembodies
trade their TK at the best possible market price. Desperate
it from the bio-spiritual values and bio-cultural ways of life
exchanges are a moral double bind in which on the one hand
that produce it.
for many ILCs, the sale of TK is a much needed source of
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income, but on the other hand it undercuts the spirit of Article
Commodification of TK essentially implies the transformation
8(j) that seeks to affirm and promote a value system underlying
of the cultural and spiritual relationships that underlie it into
the ways of life that have conserved and sustainably used
relationships mediated by the market. Commodification
biological diversity.
simplifies TK by neglecting to acknowledge that is an
outcome of the interactions between communities and their
The current negotiations in the WGABS towards IRABS have
land, culture and spirituality, and supports ILCs’ ways of life.
focused on ensuring fair contracts with ILCs for the sale of
This results in a kind of commodity fetishism in which aspects
their TK with little attention to the ecological and cultural
of lifestyles of ILCs that underpin and produce TK are ignored
relationships within which TK is embedded. TK is no longer
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at the expense of valuing TK as a commodity. This trend is
seen as a product of an organic process but rather appears as
highlighted by John and Jean Comaroff:
an abstract object in itself, distinct and therefore separable
from the community processes from which it arises.
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Anthropologists have tended to treat culture as a taken-for-
Such a reification of TK creates a false objectification that
granted way of being in the world; that is precisely the opposite
paradoxically denies the foundations of TK in its attempts
of commodity. And yet more and more ethnic groups across
to protect it.
the planet are transforming their indigenous ways and means
into private property, defining themselves as limited liability
companies, and recasting the bases of their membership in
bio-genetic terms that fly in the face of social constructionist
understandings of identity.
A growing body of scholarship has pointed to the rising
influence of the market on social identity and commodification
of culture and its redefinition as intellectual property.
Of course, cultural objects and images have long been
bought and sold, their commerce often having been part of
colonial encounters. We seem though, to have entered an age
in which signs of difference are not only exchanged as trophy
or talisman. Identity itself – in particular, ethnic identity, the
socially constructed assertion of shared blood, culture and
being-in-the-world – is increasingly being claimed as a lawful
possession by its living heirs who proceed to manage it, and
its products, by corporate means.
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8. “the existence of things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection
with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes in their eyes, the fantastic
form of relation between things… This I call fetishism… of commodities” Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 1.
9 . Comaroff, John and Jean, Ethnicity Inc., Research Proposal, 2009.
10. The problem of desperate exchanges and the moral double bind of commodification was first comprehensively discussed by Margaret Jane Radin in her seminal article
"Market Inalienability" as a response to the Chicago School of Law and Economics led by Richard Posner. 100 Harv.L.Rev.1849 (1987).
1 1 . Lucaks, George, Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat, Viking Press, 1970; Lucaks argues that 'commodification stamps its imprint on the whole consciousness
of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can "own" and "dispose of" like various objects of the external world.
And there is no natural form in which human relations be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic "qualities" into play without they being
subject to this reifying process.'
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