Jungle Medicine

A Piaroa Indian woman helps biologist Ramiro Royero with information about medicinal plants near Puerto Ayacucho, Venezuela.

Keith Dannenmiller / Alamy

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Women the world over may find a miracle brewing in a place called Uruka Amahuaja, a cluster of huts in the Venezuelan rain forest, reachable only by dugout canoe. Biologist Ramiro Royero has set up a computerized field office there to collect data on a plant still unknown to the outside world: a shrub whose poinsettia-like leaves are steeped as a medicinal tea by the Piaroa tribe to relieve menstrual cramps--without the caffeine jitters and other side effects caused by most of today's commercial remedies.

Maria Lopez, 59, a tribal matriarch, assesses Royero's work with the eye of a seasoned businesswoman--and for good reason. She knows that if the plant has commercial value, Venezuelan law may soon give the Piaroa rights for compensation from drug companies, which would have to recognize what the community calls its intellectual property. In years past, says Lopez, "we always gave up our medicines without any economic gain for ourselves. We won't make that mistake again."

Firms that sell prescription drugs and over-the-counter medicines and supplements collect revenues as high as $30 billion a year from products inspired by the traditional knowledge of indigenous communities like the Piaroa, according to biodiversity-research organizations like the Canada-based ETC Group. Researchers view jungles from South America to Southeast Asia as bountiful sources of new treatments for cancer, AIDS and other diseases. According to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, more than 25% of the ingredients in cancer medicines today were either discovered in rain forests or synthesized in labs from discoveries made there. But the tribal shamans, who lead corporate and academic researchers to therapeutic flora and fauna, rarely see a penny of the pharmaceutical industry's profits--which are the highest of any business in the world as a percentage of revenues (18.5% last year on U.S. revenues of $179 billion).

Developing nations from Venezuela to Thailand say they are feeling like chumps and are moving to better protect their indigenous communities and wildlife from what they call "biocolonialism" or "biopiracy." The governments are drafting strict laws to ensure that the world's 300 million mostly poor tribal people share in the wealth that their knowledge helps create. One of the newer strategies is for governments or indigenous communities to obtain commercial patent rights on medicines and other products divined in animals and plants before the labs can muscle in. (None of the new laws are retroactive.) They also hope to make biocolonialism a key global trade issue at next month's meeting of the U.N.'s World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. "This isn't about charity for Indians," says Royero, head of Venezuela's nongovernmental Science Development Foundation. "These drug companies have long been doing business with someone else's 'inventions,' if you will."