In Africa the Hoodia Cactus
Keeps Men Alive. Now its Secret Is 'Stolen' to Make Us Thin.
Pharmaceutical firms stand
accused of once again plundering native lore to make fortunes from natural
remedies, writes Antony Barnett.
Antony Barnett
Sunday June 17, 2001
The Observer
For thousands of years,
African tribesmen have eaten the Hoodia cactus to stave off hunger
and thirst on long hunting trips.
The Kung bushmen who live
around the Kalahari desert in southern Africa used to cut off a stem of the
cactus about the size of a cucumber and munch on it over a couple of days.
According to tradition, they ate together so they brought back what they caught
and did not eat while hunting.
Now the Hoodia, which grows to 6ft - taller
than the bushmen themselves - is at the centre of a bio-piracy row. Campaigners
say the cactus has attracted the interest of the Western drug industry, which
exploits developing countries through the international patent system.
In
April, when pharmaceutical giants were being accused of failing to provide
affordable Aids drugs in Africa, Phytopharm, a small firm in Cambridgeshire,
said it had discovered a potential cure for obesity derived from an African
cactus.
It emerged that the company had patented P57, the
appetite-suppressing ingredient in the Hoodia, hoping it would become a slimming
miracle.
Phytopharm's scientists boasted it would have none of the
side-effects of many treatments because it was derived from a natural product.
The discovery was immediately hailed by the press as a 'dieter's dream' and
Phytopharm's share price rose as City traders expected rich returns from a drug
which would revolutionise the £6bn market in slimming aids. Phytopharm acted
quickly.
It sold the rights to license the drug for $21m to Pfizer, the US
pharmaceutical giant, which hopes to have the treatment ready in pill form
within three years. Having made millions from Viagra, the impotence drug, Pfizer
now believes it has in its laboratories a drug that is going to beat fat. But it
appears that while the drug companies were busy seducing the media, their
shareholders and financiers about the wonders of their new drug, they had
forgotten to tell the bushmen, whose knowledge they had used and patented.
Phytopharm's excuse appears to be that it believed the tribes which used the
Hoodia cactus were extinct. Richard Dixey, the firm's self-proclaimed Buddhist
chief executive, told the Financial Times : 'We're doing what we can to pay
back, but it's a really fraught problem... especially as the people who
discovered the plant have disappeared.'
Yet this weekend leaders of the
people Dixey believed had disappeared are having their annual gathering at a
farm 45 miles north of Cape Town. One of the top items on the agenda is to plan
their strategy against Phytopharm and Pfizer. They are angry, saying their
ancient knowledge has been stolen, and are about to launch a challenge and
demand compensation.
Roger Chennells is the lawyer for the tribal bushmen,
who number 100,000 across South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Angola. He argued
their case in 1999 when the bushmen won 100,000 acres of white-owned farmland on
the edge of the Kalahari.
Speaking to The Observer, Chennells said: 'They
are very concerned. It feels like somebody has stolen their family silver and
cashed it in for a huge profit. The bushmen do not object to anybody using their
knowledge to produce a medicine, but they would have liked the drug companies to
have spoken to them first and come to an agreement.
'I believe there is
grounds for a legal challenge, but there is certainly a strong moral case for
the drug companies to pay proper compensation to those whose knowledge they have
taken and now claim to own.'
Alex Wijeratna, a campaigner for ActionAid, the
international development charity, said: 'This is a major case of bio-piracy.
Corporations are scouring the globe looking to rip off traditional knowledge
from some of poorest communities in the world. Consent or compensation is rarely
given. The patent system needs urgent reform to protect the knowledge nurtured
over generations by groups like the African bushmen.'
When presented with
news of this weekend's tribal gathering and the bushmen's anger about what has
happened, Dixey reacted with genuine astonishment.
He claims that one of the
reasons he set up Phytopharm was precisely to help tribal people profit from
their ancient medicinal knowledge of plants. He said: 'I honestly believed that
these bushmen had died out and am sorry to hear they feel hard done by. I am
delighted that they are still around and have a recognisable community. The
ownership of medicinal plants is extremely complex, but I have always believed
that this type of knowledge is the most valuable asset of indigenous tribes.
Instead of weaving baskets and taking tourists around, royalty payments from
medicines could transform their prospects.'
Dixey, who insisted that he
would now be happy to enter into talks with the bushmen community, said that
Phytopharm was approached with the deal by the South African Council for
Scientific and Industrial Research, which had been investigating the properties
of the Hoodia cactus.
He claims it was the CSIR that told him the bushmen
tribes who used the cactus no longer existed and assured him that agreements
were in place to help local communities.
Dr Marthinus Horak, the man in
charge of the CSIR project, defended the deal. He claimed there were only a few
hundred bushmen left in South Africa itself, living in isolated areas, and were
very hard to contact.
He said: 'We always intended to speak to the community
at some stage, but we did not believe it would be appropriate to do so before
the drug had passed on the clinical tests and been finally approved. We did not
want to raise their expectations with promises that could not be met.' Horak
said the CSIR was committed to sharing financial benefits and had a track record
in dealing with local communities through a variety of benefit-sharing
programs.
Yet critics - such as the South African campaigning group
BioWatch - believe that these benefit-sharing agreements are nothing but a sham
and mainly result in money being invested back into CSIR itself - which is
half-funded by the South African government.
Rachel Wynberg from Biowatch
said: 'All we hear is words, but we see nothing on paper. They talk of
benefit-sharing, but it seems more of a myth than reality and most of the money
seems to end up back in the CSIR.
'The details of agreements are all
confidential and we have no access to them. The
Hoodia drug has the potential to
be South Africa's first blockbuster drug and this should have all been sorted
out before the patent was awarded and not after.'
Sandy Gall, the
broadcaster and former ITN newsreader who next month is publishing a book on the
bushmen of southern Africa, described the situation as 'disgraceful'. He said:
'These ancient people have been exploited for years and it is disgraceful that
it is still happening.
'They have been displaced and dispersed, but for
someone to claim they thought the bushmen no longer existed is either naive or
deceitful.'
The harsh environments in which the Kung bushmen have lived for
thousands of years have led them to become expert botanists. They can readily
identify more than 300 different types of plant with different properties and
campaigners believe that the row over the Hoodia patent is just the first of
many such battles to come.
Tomorrow pressure groups will converge on a
meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Geneva to protest against the system
of patents which they claim helps drug corporations to exploit developing
countries and prevents cheap access to drugs.
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