NGOs and the process of prior informed consent in bioprospecting research: the Maya ICBG project in Chiapas, Mexico

In 1998, a 5-year bioprospecting project that came to be known as the Maya ICBG was initiated among the Maya communities of the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. The project was funded by agencies of the US government - the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Agriculture. Project personnel were drawn from a major US university, a federal Mexican research institution, a small British pharmaceutical company, and numerous Maya collaborators. The major aims of the research included drug discovery and pharmaceutical development, medical ethnobiology and floristic inventory, and conservation, sustained harvest, and economic growth. In spite of strong support from local Maya communities and Mexican federal agencies, the project was terminated in its second year due to the actions of local, national, and international non-governmental organisations, which characterised the project as biopiracy. Major themes in the acrimonious debate that developed concerned the definition of prior informed consent (PIC), local communities' rights to grant PIC, and who should judge whether PIC had been obtained. In this paper, we describe the events leading to the termination of the Maya ICBG and question the motives and methods of certain NGOs in usurping the rights of local communities to act on their own behalf concerning the sustainable use of their own biological resources.