New Report: Socioeconomics of Bioprospecting

The International Journal of Ecological Economics and Statistics (Vol. 26, Issue No.3, 2012) has just published a special volume titled "Socioeconomics and Management of Bioprospecting". The new volume gathers together ideas presented at the CBD conference in Nagoya last October, revealing the difference in opinion between stakeholders in developed and developing countries as well as a variety of approaches.

As described in the volume's editorial "This volume is therefore characterized by a selection of papers that address issues such as: incentives for R&D in the economic sectors that use products of bioprospecting; implications of recent legal changes on access to genetic resources on sharing of knowledge; understanding better the nature of partnerships for access and benefit sharing in diverse sectors that use genetic materials; the nature of special agreements for access and benefit sharing and why they result in a low market price for the ‘owners’ of the resources; and, highlighting lessons from Brazil on the sharing of benefits from traditional knowledge and the challenge that the assignment of property rights, and other legal instruments,  bring along with it. All in all, the selected papers deploy a range of approaches, with a strong interdisciplinary focus, and draw on extensive experience of  the authors, who have worked in this field from an academic and practical point of view for many years".

Abstracts for papers within the volume can be found here.