For whose benefit? Benefit-sharing within Contractual ABSAgreementsfrom an Economic Perspective– the Example of Pharmaceutical Bioprospection

The extinction of genetic resources as a consequence of land development, especially in ‘biodiversity hot spots’like rain forests in South America or South East Asia, is becoming a serious problem - not only for local communitiesbut also for international firms in the pharmaceutical industry. These firms are to some degree interestedin genetic sequences or active ingredients of endemic species which serve as important input materials forinnovative pharmaceutical products. Thus, there is a conflict between different interest groups. During recentyears there have been a number of publications on the so called benefit-sharing (BS) as stipulated by the UnitedNations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This convention was passed in 1992 and attempts to establish‘benefit-sharing’ as a means to fairly and equitably share the benefits accruing from the commercial use ofbiodiversity. Although widely discussed in the political sciences, sociology and ethnology and subject to intenseanecdotal case-study research there still is some lack of economic analysis of BS-agreements.In this paper we propose economic criteria for the evaluation of benefit-sharing and discuss different forms ofbenefit-sharing that derive from the practical implementation of the instrument. We find that from an economicpoint of view benefit-sharing is often far less conducive to the attainment of the CBD’s goals than often assertedin the literature...