The Biosafety Protocol and the

Importance of Socio-Economic Impacts

Biotechnology Working Group: Briefing Paper Number 3

BSWG, Montreal, Canada, May 1997

A biosafety protocol should address socio-economic effects resulting from the introduction and transfer of LMOs to biologically diverse ecosystems or regions. Throughout the Convention on Biological Diversity, both in the text and the annexes, a mandate is established that a biosafety protocol should consider the adverse effect that introduction of an LMO may have

"on the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity."

• The science which is useful for environmental risk assessment is not itself adequate to measure the socio-economic impact of the transfer of biotechnology and LMOs. It is critical to bring to bear other sciences and areas of human knowledge (e.g., economics, sociology and ethics) in order to understand the real world effects which will result from the adoption of these techniques. Changes in employment, loss of export markets, and uncontrolled growth of power of multinational corporations are likely to be important consequences of biotechnology for many countries. These changes will be inextricably linked to the ability of peoples to conserve and use biological diversity in a manner that promotes sustainability.

• Already, international organizations estimate that biotechnology may lead to significant job loss in the Third World. Forty (40%) percent of all present production processes in the world are based on biological materials and can now, via genetic engineering in combination with the patenting of living material, be brought under the control of Northern-based transnational companies. Initial assessments by the International Labor Organization (ILO) suggest possible employment losses of up to fifty (50%) in the Third World due to the application of biotechnologies. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has published estimates suggesting that future annual payments of patent fees and royalties from Third World countries to private corporations based in the North may exceed their annual debt payments already being transferred to the North. Poverty has been shown to be an important causal factor in the loss of biodiversity.

• Use of biotechnology in the North may lead to development of products in the North that substitute for present exports in Southern countries. For example, genetic material taken from centers of origin is transferred to research labs in other countries, and utilized in industrialized production of products formerly produced in the countries of the center of origin. There will also be shifts of production from small scale farms to large estates and/or, a decoupling of entire agricultural export regions from the world market. Farmers, and others whose employment is dependent on agricultural production, who lose jobs due to this substitution effect will have little incentive to conserve and respect sustainable use of biological diversity.

• Use of agricultural biotechnology will increase the economic and political strength of transnational corporations at the expense of national states. As agricultural economies are reduced to the production of component parts in global commodity markets, qualitatively new economic patterns of interaction arise with qualitatively new suppliers and states of competition. This "global commodity roulette" (Fowler, et. al., 1988) will unilaterally strengthen the power of transnational corporations, as single highly-integrated companies control the new technologies, forcing profound changes in social structures. In fact, the biotechnology industry already has successfully influenced national and international policies that have affected trade and control of these new technologies.

• The components of biodiversity - living organisms of our planet - are being transformed into mere property through an unprecedented expansion of the concept of patentability. Bioprospecting results in a significant flow of genetic material across boundaries in a corporate attempt to reshuffle life and obtain patent monopolies which enable transnational corporations to sell the LMOs and genetic material back to the original farmers at highly inflated prices. In addition, the patenting of life forms has negative ethical consequences for large numbers of the world's peoples.

• Economic pressures resulting from the new biotechnologies have led transnational corporations to monopolize basic information through the patent system and expanded claims of confidential business information. The socio-economic impact of the increasing privatization of business information is a reduction in transparency which in turn inhibits active political participation and an impoverishment of social life. A biosafety protocol needs to include sufficient mechanisms to ameliorate these potential negative impacts. Such mechanisms should allow for access to information and public participation.

• A biosafety protocol should be concerned with the social, economic and ethical impacts that the introduction and transfer of LMOs will have on people. In particular, introduction of LMOs may make people more or less able to sustain themselves and the biological diversity for which they are stewards.

The conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity is possible

only if the people living in the countries or regions of biodiversity are

economically, socially and politically able

to meet the demands of stewardship of the world's biologically diverse resources.