Bioprospecting refers to the scientific investigation of plants and folk medicines in the hope of developing new drugs. Its 1980s revival raised concerns about the intellectual property of indigenous people, requiring bioprospecting scientists to make legitimate benefit-sharing agreements with resource owners and communities. Despite the “ethical” look of such a movement, it has been criticized as a new form of “biocapitalism.” This is especially true in India, where the government has initiated databases of “valuable” traditional medicine, such as Ayurveda, and criticism has been directed at the way the complex composition of Ayurveda was disentangled and reorganized into elementary botanical units commensurate with the global pharmaceutical industry. This paper explores the politics embedded in the material-semiotic process of databasing Ayurveda and herbal plants. Focusing on a state government project in Uttarakhand, India, the study reveals how the project relies on colonial herbal relations while generating new and unexpected relations among particular medicinal plants (jadi buti), folk Ayurvedic healers (vaidyas), and local plant taxonomists. This study highlights the necessity of grasping the emergent biodiversity databasing initiatives in India as “experiments,” open-ended, uncertain, and indeterminate projects rather than part of a universal process of pharmaceuticalization.
Keywords:
In his latest book Pharmocracy: Values, Politics, and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine (2017), Kaushik Sunder Rajan attempts to describe the political economy of health in contemporary India, emphasizing how it operates in relation to global biomedicine. He focuses on the Indian government’s two distinct recent policy shifts to promote “harmonization” with the global standard: biomedical (clinical trials)Footnote1 and legal (intellectual property regimes).Footnote2 According to Sunder Rajan, such “harmonization” must be understood as “hegemonization,” that is, the expansion of multinational corporate hegemony. Although attempting to ensure “ethical” clinical and legal trials, the harmonization must also be seen in the light of the broader trajectory of the privatization of trials and the potential expansion of pharmaceutical markets for the Euro-American industry.
As Sunder Rajan also admits, however, even in the process of “harmonization/ hegemonization,” there is a multiplicity of contested visions and perspectives surrounding intellectual property rights regimes.Footnote3 The movement to protect biodiversity and intellectual property rights for indigenous people constitutes a counterforce, as it decreases the power of global pharmaceutical industries, contrary to the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement.
