The Subcontinent's inheritance of traditional knowledge and methods is safe. Think again.
Thirty years after developing countries were first made to believe that their economic interests were perfectly safe in collecting and conserving quickly disappearing plant germplasm, the global bosses are at it again. However, instead of the biological inheritance, this time it is traditional knowledge that the international community is suddenly so concerned and worried about.
Once again, the same emotional rhetoric fills the air. Traditional knowledge, which has been passed on from generation to generation by local and tribal communities in the developing world, is getting lost. This knowledge might soon be lost to posterity, denying humanity its rightful inheritance. The answer, we are told, is to document the traditional knowledge, which is, after all, all of mankind's heritage.
In the mid-1960s and early 1970s the same justifications were used to seek monopoly control over plant germplasm resources in developing countries. At the height of the green revolution, with a land grant system borrowed from the United States well in place in India and other countries, prevailing rhetoric said that plants were mankind's heritage but were being lost in the process of development. Letting plant germplasm disappear would be at the world's own peril. So what needed to be done was to collect whatever was available and keep it safely stored and coded in gene banks.