Holcombe, Sarah; Janke, Terri --- "Patenting the Kakadu Plum and the Marjarla Tree: Biodiscovery, Intellectual Property and Indigenous Knowledge" [2012] ELECD 141; in Rimmer, Matthew; McLennan, Alison (eds), "Intellectual Property and Emerging Technologies" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Intellectual Property and Emerging Technologies

Editor(s): Rimmer, Matthew; McLennan, Alison

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849802468

Section: Chapter 11

Section Title: Patenting the Kakadu Plum and the Marjarla Tree: Biodiscovery, Intellectual Property and Indigenous Knowledge

Author(s): Holcombe, Sarah; Janke, Terri

Number of pages: 27

Extract:

11. Patenting the Kakadu plum and the
Marjarla tree: biodiscovery,
intellectual property and Indigenous
knowledge
Sarah Holcombe and Terri Janke

The Australian Government's 2009 endorsement of the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007 brings a renewed
recognition and focus on Indigenous knowledge ownership in the area of
Indigenous cultural and intellectual property.1 However, embedding this
rights discourse into the action and language of natural resource manage-
ment has not been taken up by the Australian Government, as yet. Austral-
ia's federal system, under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity
Conservation Act 1999 (Cth) is ad hoc, with several states and territories
creating their own biological resources acts and regional groups their own
management processes. The Government-commissioned Hawke Inquiry
into the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999
(Cth) found that `each jurisdiction has different rules and requirements for
accessing biological resources' and that the `Nationally Consistent
Approach' policy developed in 2000 `should be reinvigorated'.2
Prior to this Inquiry, in 2008, both of the authors were engaged by the
Natural Resource Management Board of the Northern Territory to
develop resources and tools to ensure that when ethnobiological knowledge
is integrated into resource management programs and in research generally
in that jurisdiction it is done ethically and equitably. This chapter will
discuss several of the challenges we encountered, which accord with the


1
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007, adopted by
General Assembly Resolution 61/295 on 13 September 2007
...