Benefícios da biodiversidade para as comunidades quilombolas: a nova legislação os sustenta?

Abstract

The richness of Brazilian biodiversity provides the country with numerous economic advantages, attracting foreign attracting foreign interests to this genetic material to produce food, medicines and other products. Brazil has hundreds of traditional communities, such as indigenous and quilombolas, which compose its socio-biodiversity. These communities hold ancient acquirements that are used to produce knowledge about the use of native plants and animals, and which are being exploited by companies to manufacture new products, such as medicines, food, chemicals and cosmetics. In this way, owning or having access to biodiversity has acquired a strategic role. Unfortunately, all the Brazilian biodiversity and the knowledge of the traditional communities attract the action of biopiracy. This illicit action has been combated all over the world, with the creation of international laws and treaties, to secure the right of nations to their genetic patrimony and to promote a fair distribution of the benefits of commercialization of the products developed by bioprospecting, for the traditional societies from which the knowledge and/or bioproducts were obtained. The Law No. 13.123 of 2015, denominated as the New Biodiversity Law, was recently sanctioned in Brazil. The research point explored in this dissertation was to verify if the New Law came to support the need of the quilombola communities with respect to the distribution of benefits. Its main objective is to analyze this New Law considering the previous legislation. The research had a bibliographic character, based on a literature review. To complement the study, in an illustrative way, interviews were conducted with members of some quilombola communities, through a questionnaire with semi-structured questions. The study concluded that, despite bringing innovations, the New Biodiversity Law still does not meet the wishes of traditional communities, especially about fair sharing of benefits, both because they are unaware of the legislation and because the law allows for other means of compensation than just monetary ones and allows biopiracy to continue.