Word: piaroa
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...huts in the Venezuelan rain forest, reachable only by dugout canoe. Biologist Ramiro Royero has set up a computerized field office there to collect data on a plant still unknown to the outside world: a shrub whose poinsettia-like leaves are steeped as a medicinal tea by the Piaroa tribe to relieve menstrual cramps--without the caffeine jitters and other side effects caused by most of today's commercial remedies...
Maria Lopez, 59, a tribal matriarch, assesses Royero's work with the eye of a seasoned businesswoman--and for good reason. She knows that if the plant has commercial value, Venezuelan law may soon give the Piaroa rights for compensation from drug companies, which would have to recognize what the community calls its intellectual property. In years past, says Lopez, "we always gave up our medicines without any economic gain for ourselves. We won't make that mistake again...
Firms that sell prescription drugs and over-the-counter medicines and supplements collect revenues as high as $30 billion a year from products inspired by the traditional knowledge of indigenous communities like the Piaroa, according to biodiversity-research organizations like the Canada-based ETC Group. Researchers view jungles from South America to Southeast Asia as bountiful sources of new treatments for cancer, AIDS and other diseases. According to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, more than 25% of the ingredients in cancer medicines today were either discovered in rain forests or synthesized in labs from discoveries made there. But the tribal...
Even a poison secreted by South American frogs and used by tribes like the Piaroa to make deadly blowgun darts now serves as the basis for a morphine substitute being developed by Chicago-based drug giant Abbott Laboratories. "This is what I call the genetic patrimony of our indigenous peoples," says Venezuelan Science and Technology Vice Minister Marlene Yadira. "And if these communities disappear" because of their poverty, "who will be the source of this knowledge for the companies...
What, if anything, the participants hash out in Geneva will be closely watched as far away as Aska Aja, another Piaroa village upriver from Uruka Amahuaja. There, Royero recently met with a shaman, Jacinto Martinez, 62, whose wife had died hours earlier from an operable eye tumor. The tribe had no access to a surgeon--nor money to pay one. For years, Martinez has helped scientists identify plants near Aska Aja that treat everything from skin rashes to diarrhea. What he would like in return, he says, waving away flies from his wife's wrapped corpse, is some...