Building a regime to tackle biopiracy in Southeast Asia

Thanks to the advancement of biotechnology, a growing number of actors in developed countries, particularly multinational corporations have accessed biological resources in developing countries. However, the exploitation of resources and knowledge has inflicted intense damage on developing countries and their indigenous people and local communities who have made enormous contribution to conservation of resources because the companies have rarely acknowledged their contribution and shared the benefits. This phenomenon is called biopiracy and although biopiracy has happened all around the world, this dissertation will focus on biopiracy in Southeast Asia, one of the regions vulnerable to biopiracy because the regime in the region has a number of problems to tackle biopiracy. Therefore, in order to discuss how to tackle biopiracy in Southeast Asia, at first, this dissertation has identified some definitions of biopiracy including its legal concept. Following the (legal) definitions, this dissertation has analysed a number of biopiracy cases around the world including Southeast Asia, identifying the common patterns and problems, particularly grievances of the people and communities. On this basis, four international regimes relevant to biopiracy, namely biodiversity, human rights, intellectual property and investment regimes have been analysed particularly, focusing on their core principles, relevant cases and debates to show the international framework. Based on the analysis of the international framework, some regimes to tackle biopiracy in other regions and countries have been analysed focusing on the two African regional instruments and some national laws and institutions in Peru and India because they have some useful instruments to tackle biopiracy. On the basis of the analysis of the regimes, this dissertation has analysed the current status of regional and national laws and institutions in Southeast Asia, identifying some problems such as lack of enforcement mechanisms. Finally, in order to address the problems and tackle biopiracy, the final chapter has made a number of suggestions to show how to improve the regional instruments and national laws and institutions to tackle biopiracy in the region. While on a regional level, this dissertation has shown how the regional instruments should be improved to be more specific, on a national level, some key components of the model national regimes have been suggested because they can be used to make new laws or institutions or reform the existing ones. In particular, this dissertation has discussed how the international investment regime could be used to tackle biopiracy by improving their national laws and amending their international investment agreements because of the regime’s potential to tackle biopiracy. On this basis, this dissertation aims to suggest not only how to improve the current laws and institutions (or, regimes) but also how to utilize a potential regime to tackle biopiracy in the region