#Brazil to step up crackdown on #biopiracy in 2011
►http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/60675
“Given that (fighting biopiracy) is a new process and that Brazil has one of the biggest reserves of biodiversity in the world, I think most of this activity is illegal, and we’re going to find those people,” (...) examples of biopiracy abound, such as the development in the 1970s of the hypertension medication captopril from a snake venom that indigenous groups used on arrowhead tips.
Pharmaceuticals companies also used the yellow-and-green Kambo frog, found in Brazil’s Amazon state of Acre, to create anti-inflammatory drugs without distributing benefits to local residents, he said. Many of these incidents came before a 2001 decree that created the current rules governing species use.
(...) One of the biggest fines levied so far was on Brazil’s largest cosmetics maker Natura
(...)
Critics say Brazil’s often aggressive efforts to prevent biopiracy threaten to slow crucial scientific #research that could provide new #cancer treatments or remedies for diseases suffered by local populations.
alors, cancer ou cosmétiques ?