Commercial Use of Biodiversity

This book provides insights to various stakeholders for making the commercial use of biodiversity a gainful enterprise for both the poor and the rich.  The benefits from genetic resources are mostly drawn from the commercial use of traditional knowledge held by indigenous communities. This book discusses the issues of access to these resources and the equitable sharing of benefits drawn from them by examining a range of worldwide biodiversity prospecting partnerships. It underlines the acrimonious debates between technology-rich developed countries and biodiversity-rich developing countries. Additionally, assessing the bargaining power of developing countries and the emerging biodiversity laws, it highlights the ‘thinking globally, acting locally’ principle and urges for access and benefit sharing to be evolved as a new discipline of study. The book will prove beneficial to all stakeholders involved in the business of the world’s biodiversity.

Shivendu K. Srivastava served in the Indian Forest Service (Madhya Pradesh cadre) till recently. Prior to his last assignment as Project Director, livelihoods development project of UNDP in Bhopal, he was associated with Dehradun-based Forest Survey of India (FSI), an institution responsible for reporting on the status of forest cover of the country, under the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change. He was involved in forestry research (1997–2002) at Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, where, targeting forest-based enterprises, he took up far-reaching extension work.His varied experiences include catching live a man-eater tigress and its cub (1991), introducing the first ‘Biodiversity Conservation Working Circle’ in Madhya Pradesh (probably even in India) and calculating the rates of timber bought from private growers by graphical method. He has been a member of the central editorial board of Indian Forester (a peer-reviewed international journal since 1875). He is fond of teaching, and he is a poet too.