Today’s topic comes from the National Forensics Association. It is their 2015-2016 topic resolved: “The United States federal government should substantially increase restrictions on bio prospecting.” If you’re new debater you likely have a lot of questions about this topic but let’s focus on just a couple of them mainly what is bio prospecting and what is a possible affirmative case that you can start researching right now?
Bio prospecting generally has two components. The first part of it is discovery; you’re going to a new area where you’re finding new life. The second part of it is taking that biological discovery and commercializing it for profit. It’s that commercialization aspect of it that makes some people refer to prospecting as bio piracy. Generally, people reserve the term “biopiracy” for the most exploitative type of bioprospecting, where indigenous knowledge is used to gain profit in developed countries but without cutting the developing nations in on that share.
Perhaps the most famous example of bioprospecting, or biopiracy, is the Neem tree which is something that grows throughout India and Nepal. For a long time, the anti-fungal properties of the Neem tree were known to the indigenous people, but then a drug company from the developed world came in an patented anti-fungal properties in one of his own drugs. This patent caused significant opposition, including from Vandana Shiva. She, along with many other people, were successfully able to challenge the patent and the drug company no longer has any sort of legal claim it to that anti-fungal patent.
So that’s the basics on bioprospecting. What type of affirmative case can you construct to run in rounds? One of the first things I came across when researching this topic was a treaty named the Nagoya Protocol. The Nagoya Protocol is part of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the signatories are required to have contracts with nations that they are going into for bioprospecting. If they develop anything from the biological material that they find in those countries, then they are required to undergo some sort of access and profit sharing with that country.
Many people applauded the intent behind this treaty but still others are critical of the potential harmful effects that the bureaucratic burden would have on public institutions for researching new chemical compounds in medicines in these areas. I’m sure people are going to find much more creative ways to define bioprospecting in affirmative cases, but these are the first things that I found on the bioprospecting topic. I think it is going to prove to be a very complex topic with a lot of different opportunities for strategies both on the affirmative and negative.