Law on bioprospecting would only hurt Hawai'i environment
By Eric Gaidos
Hawai'i sets itself apart in striving to protect, and provide universal access to, the beauty and benefits that nature has endowed these islands. For example, regulations protecting shorelines and shoreline access reinforce a sense of natural commonwealth to be shared with aloha by Hawai'i's residents and their guests.
But current legislation to regulate "bioprospecting" — the search for natural products of commercial value in industry, agriculture or medicine — that appears to respect this spirit of conservation and universal access actually would do far more harm than good.
Senate Bill 643, which seeks to guarantee an equitable distribution of profits from bioprospecting, includes a three-year moratorium on collection of biological material from public lands. The bill confuses scientific research with commercial development. It also neglects the technical and economic realities of bioprospecting, and will alienate people who have an important role to play in preserving Hawai'i's biological diversity.
Hawai'i's island geography and unique tropical forest, marine and volcanic environments provide unparalleled opportunities to study the origin of biodiversity, the role of individual species in the environment, and the complex relationships between organisms. This knowledge not only allows our society to measure biodiversity and assess potential threats, it is useful in designing methods to protect it.
Often, these studies require that small amounts of material be returned to the laboratory for analysis. The impact of this sampling on the environment is negligible, while the potential return — in terms of knowledge used to manage these environments later — is often incalculable.
Without these studies, we simply will be unaware of the potential threats posed by invasive plant and animal species, climate change, pollution and habitat fragmentation.
Researchers publish their findings in open scientific and popular literature, where their work becomes part of the commonwealth of knowledge. Centers of scholarly research such as the University of Hawai'i already have mechanisms in place that govern the use of that research for commercial development, mechanisms that could be used to ensure its proper and equitable use.
Bioprospecting is sometimes cited as a significant source of employment and revenue for tropical regions attempting to diversify their economic base. However, the economic returns of large-scale bioprospecting efforts in such places as Costa Rica have been characterized as disappointing.
The technical reality is that prospecting is not the bottleneck in developing new applications — that is the intensive industrial, agricultural or clinical testing required. The economic reality is that industries have multiple sources of candidate compounds, synthetic and natural, and will respond to excessive restrictions on one source by switching to another.
There is simply not much money in bioprospecting per se. There are more substantive economic opportunities in developing technologies and training to screen and test candidate compounds. The proposed legislation will do nothing but discourage such development.
It is particularly ironic that this bill would suppress an alternative to industries such as agriculture, construction and even, to some extent, tourism, which inflict much of the ecological damage to the Islands.
Finally, this legislation inevitably would lead to the termination of research that monitors existing threats to Hawaiian biodiversity and uncovers new ones. That work, and the people who carry it out, bear testimony to the deleterious effects of human activity.
Many of those researchers, as passionate about their work as they are about the environment it may help protect, reluctantly would find regions of the world more conducive to their studies.
Others would be turned away by the certainty that they would be unable to explore fully the richness of biological wonders that Hawai'i offers. None of this would halt the continued destruction of the Islands' biological riches treasured by Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians alike.
There just would be fewer witnesses to the crime.
Eric Gaidos is an assistant professor of geobiology at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.
