ANTONY BARNETT and STEFAANS BRMMER, Johannesburg | Friday
FOR thousands of years, members of Southern Africa’s Kung tribe have eaten the Hoodia cactus to stave off hunger and thirst on long hunting trips.
The Kung people – a subdivision of the San – used to cut off a stem of the cactus about the size of a cucumber and munch on it over a couple of days as they wandered the Kalahari. According to tradition, they did not eat while hunting.
Now the Hoodia, which grows to two metres, is at the centre of a bio-piracy row. The cactus has attracted the interest of the Western drug industry that, campaigners charge, exploits developing countries and indigenous people. In April, when pharmaceutical giants were being accused of failing to provide affordable Aids drugs in Africa, Phytopharm, a small firm in Cambridgeshire, announced it had secured the rights to a potential cure for obesity derived from an African cactus – a possible slimming miracle drug.
It later emerged the company had obtained – from South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) – rights to commercialise P57, which contains the appetite-suppressing active compound of the Hoodia cactus. The CSIR owns the patent.
Phytopharm’s scientists boasted it would have none of the side-effects of many other 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 London City traders expected rich returns from a drug that would revolutionise the roughly R70-billion market in slimming aids.
Phytopharm soon entered a deal worth about R170-million with international pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to take P57 through clinical trials. Pfizer hopes to have the treatment ready in pill form within three years. Having profited wildly 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 Kung people, whose traditional knowledge had made it all possible.
Phytopharm’s excuse appears to be that it believed the tribes that used the Hoodia cactus were extinct. Richard Dixey, the firm’s self-proclaimed Buddhist CEO, 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.”
But last week leaders of the San and Kung people were gathering at !Khwaattu farm, a San cultural centre about 70km north of Cape Town. One of the items on the agenda was to plan their strategy against the CSIR, Phytopharm and Pfizer. They are angry, saying their ancient knowledge has been “stolen”, and are demanding compensation.
When presented with news of the gathering, Dixey reacted with astonishment. He claimed that one of the reasons he set up Phytopharm was precisely to help tribal people profit from their ancient medicinal knowledge of plants.
“I honestly believed that these bushmen [San] 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.”
Roger Chennells is a lawyer for the San, who number 100_000 across South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Angola. Chennells said: “They [the San] are very concerned. It feels like somebody has stolen their family silver and cashed it in for a huge profit. They 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.”
But Adi Paterson, executive vice-president of the CSIR, this week countered that the CSIR is a member of a national bio-prospecting consortium that “works to agreed ethical standards with respect to indigenous knowledge”, and that the CSIR had helped pioneer community sharing in intellectual rights in South Africa. He said the P57 project could be traced back to work undertaken on edible plants in the 1960s, and the active ingredient was isolated around 1983. The CSIR patented it in the mid-1990s.
He said the agreement with Phytopharm – and the subsequent agreement with Pfizer – meant P57 could go through proper clinical trials and reach global markets “while protecting South African interests”. In terms of these agreements, the CSIR would receive milestone payments and royalties, while aspects of production would be located in South Africa. The agreements also included “recognition of communities”, he said.
Both Chennels and Paterson this week said they are ready to enter negotiations to settle the matter.
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