concept

Nagoya Protocol

An international agreement in force since 2014 governing who may take biological material from where, and what must be given back. It rests on three pillars: permission must be obtained in advance from the provider country's competent authority and from the indigenous communities concerned; a contract must be negotiated setting out access terms, milestone payments and royalties; and benefits must be shared fairly, in money and in transferred research capacity. It has real effect — the hoodia agreement with the San people and the 1.5% rooibos levy are direct results. But it has a structural limit: it presumes that biological resources are property under some state's sovereignty. For an organism that is itself a rights-bearing subject, this framework has nothing to say.