Maca growers and indigenous organizations were outraged when, in 2001, a New Jersey-based company, PureWorld Botanicals, received a US patent for exclusive commercial distribution of an extract of maca's active libido-enhancing compounds that it branded as MacaPure.
Peruvian officials called the patent an "emblematic case" of biopiracy and are preparing to challenge it in US courts.
The maca dispute is just the latest collision between indigenous people and commercial interests over so-called biological prospecting, the growing practice of scouring the globe for exotic plants, microbes, and other living things ripe for commercial exploitation.
Bioprospecting has huge potential for good, say researchers who go to sea, climb mountains, and trek to obscure corners of the world in search of exotic and undiscovered life.
A 2005 UN University report concluded that 62 percent of all cancer drugs were created from bioprospecting discoveries. The venom of a deadly sea snail found off the coast of the Philippines led Elan Pharmaceuticals Inc. to develop the painkiller Prialt, which US regulators approved in 2004. The key ingredient in the breast cancer drug Taxol owned by Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. is taken from the bark of the yew tree, and Wyeth's kidney transplant drug Rapamune comes from Easter Island soil.
But bioprospecting is mostly unregulated, and there are mounting calls to establish legal frameworks for such work.
The Convention on Biological Diversity produced at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro entitled nations to a share of the profits from substances yielded by their flora and fauna. It was ratified by 188 countries -- but not the United States, which argues that such a requirement stifles innovation and would undermine the patent system.
That hasn't stopped some of the world's poorest countries, which also hold the richest pockets of natural biodiversity, from fighting to apply the convention to international patent law.
Peru hopes the MacaPure dispute will become a pivotal case in attempts to require all patent applications to disclose the source of genetic materials.
