In 1994, a U.S. company and the United States Department of Agriculture secured a European patent for a method of using neem extracts to control fungi. The neem tree, however, was not a discovery. Across the Indian subcontinent, it had long been used in traditional medicine, agriculture, and furniture making, with its pesticidal properties documented in Sanskrit texts and embedded in everyday agricultural practice. After a six-year legal challenge led by an Indian organisation named the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, supported by international allies, the patent was revoked in 2000. Five years after that, the decision was upheld on appeal, with the board ruling that the method lacked novelty and an inventive step, given its long-documented use in India. Now, three decades later, the neem case looks less like an aberration than a template. The frontier has moved from isolated plant compounds to the systems-level ecological knowledge that smallholder and Adivasi communities have developed over generations. The next dispute may involve a soil microbiome product, an agroecological decision-support tool, or a machine-learning model trained on data from traditional preparations. India’s current legal architecture is not designed to respond to it. Why is this knowledge different? Most public discussion of biopiracy still focuses on the misappropriation of specific biological resources: a plant compound, a seed variety, or a fermentation culture. The legal response has focused correspondingly on access and benefit-sharing rules, prior art databases, and geographical indication protections. These instruments work, imperfectly, for that kind of theft. The…This article was originally published on Mongabay
