Africa: South still battling North's biopiracy

The United Nations declared 2010 the Year of Biodiversity. But 17 years after the Convention on Biological Diversity was adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the issue of biopiracy is still pitching North against South. Researchers and activists have coined the term biopiracy, "the theft of genetic resources", to describe corporations’ practice of securing "profitable private monopolies by staking out patent claims on Africa’s genes, plants, and related traditional knowledge", according to the African Centre for Biosafety (ACB), based in South Africa.