Biopiracy is a silent disease that disrupts biodiversity conservation efforts.

Nonetheless, the early European explorers sailed east and west in search of gold, silver, and rare spices, and medicinal plants were the treasure they found. In his book “The Customs of the Kingdoms of India,” Marco Polo (1254–1324) wrote “We shall tell you next of the great kingdom of Malabar [Southwestern India] there is a great abundance of pepper and ginger, besides cinnamon in plenty and coconuts.” Moreover, in the year 1293, Marco Polo sailed homeward bound from China, pausing at Seilan (Ceylon or Sri Lanka) along the way. He wrote “On leaving the island of Andaman and steering for 1,000 miles a little South of West, the traveller reaches the island of Seilan (Ceylon). The actual size is better circumstanced than any other island in the world” [1, 2].

The writings of Marco Polo were instrumental in the development of Spice Route [3] which was later utilized in colonial “Plant Hunting” that began in 1400 and peaked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries [4]. Following the Spice Routes, Christopher Columbus voyaged across the Atlantic Ocean with the blessings of the Spanish Court and sorted new route to the east through which wealth of knowledge on plant-based riches were obtained. Charlton noted that Columbus collected many valuable plants including Tobacco from Cuba in the year 1492 [5].

According to [3], the definition of biopiracy is “the unauthorized extraction of biological resources and/or associated traditional knowledge from developing countries, or the patenting of spurious inventions based on such knowledge or resources without compensation.” The hidden cases of biopiracy were started opposed, and the term biopiracy was coined in the 1990s by environmentalists and nongovernmental organizations [6]. Biopiracy as “a silent disease” is hardly detectable because it frequently does not leave any traces. Unfortunately, the electronic media favours to highlight environment pollution and deforestation, while biopiracy incidents are less reported. This silent pillaging is depriving countries that lack proper advancement in biotechnology primarily in Africa, Latin America, and Asia of the means to financially support developing and sustaining biotechnological projects. Biopiracy disrupts biodiversity conservation efforts [7–9].

The corporate hijacking of food is the most important health hazard in this era; using intellectual property rights, larger cooperation gets patent on indigenous medicinal plants, seeds, genetic resources, and traditional formulas by excluding local identity, as listed in Table 1. Taking advantage of these rights, “biopiracy” has happened by taking biological resources from one country to another country with the intention of building up global economies. As highlighted at the protest in the late 1990s by Dr. Vandana Shiva, the two examples from Indian context can be highlighted as basmati varieties of rice are transferred to build up the rice economy of United States and the export of neem seeds from Indian farms by giant corporates [15, 20].

<Table 1 OMMITTED>

According to [21], this undoubtedly indicates that European companies make enormous profits by using the biological properties of native and endemic plants from the developing countries but nothing goes back to them [21]. The share of the international trade of herbal products and alternative medicine market in a global economy has been increasing at a rapid rate of approximately 15% annually. Approximately 29,000 herbal substances used by more than 1000 companies have annual revenues exceeding US$ 60 billion, with the bulk of the herbal products, or at least the raw material sourced from biodiversity-rich countries in Asia, Africa, and South America [22, 23].

Thereby, biopiracy has long been a concern of developing nations with rich biodiversity. “Nagoya Protocol” has given a resolution of the controversy in bioprospecting, and solutions will lead to many researchers neglect by showing their burden of regulation to work [24].

Biopolitical land draws upon the energies of the global south to promote settler colonialist invasions and antiblackness

Yang 17 [Wang, K aka la paperson; University of Minnesota Press; June 1, 2017; Ph.D. Social and Cultural Studies in Education, University of California, Berkeley; “A Third University Is Possible” Settler Colonialism Is a Set of Technologies; https://manifold.umn.edu/read/a-third-university-is-possible/section/e33f977a-532b-4b87-b108-f106337d9e53]

For the reader who is concerned with the genealogy of theory, especially for you who will shape this theory into your own, know that by deploying the “biopolitical” and “technologies,” you do not have to allow yourself to be claimed into a Eurocentric lineage. Rather, the genealogy of (y)our theory lies in the breaks as theorized by Black and Indigenous intellectuals.

The object—which is not a human subject, which is the state of Black being that is already outside of the “human” ethnoclass of Man—resists, according to Fred Moten. The object resists Eurocentric theory “by way of open analytic failure” of that theory; in other words, it resists by dwelling in the “breakdown of the breakdown.” To theorize in the break is to theorize in an elsewhere that is already beyond the dispossession of that oppressive theory, “by way of a kind of recapitulative improvisation (a lingering in the iconic break of this double breakdown).”[28] Put plainly, to theorize in the break is to improvise theory in the rupture from the genealogy of the (often European) founding fathers. It is to think, sing, write, and embody theory in the elsewhere, in the sovereign, in the Black.

By theorizing machinery, you do not have to embrace Gilles Deleuze, despite the totalizing sweep of his and Félix Guattari’s thinking. In “Breaking up with Deleuze,” Eve Tuck parses out differences between her understandings of knowledge, change, and regeneration and those pieces of Deleuzian theory of desire that seem to echo Indigenous understanding. Unlike the unconscious directions of Deleuzian desiring machines, Tuck “insists that desire accrues wisdom in assemblage, and does so over generations.”[29] Eve Tuck broke up with Deleuze so that you may avoid his seductions.

Likewise, theorizing land as biopolitical target is better understood through Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics than through Michel Foucault’s biopolitics. Mbembe breaks from Foucault’s interest in the disciplining of liberal life by examining the “subjugation of life to the power of death.”[30] One can see how necropower has long been in effect in settler colonial invasions of Indigenous lands—and has evolved its killing, capturing, and living-dead zombie technologies.[31] Black studies has already made multiple breaks with the Western project of uplifting and theorizing “humanity.” In theorizing the human, or the genealogy of prisons, or capitalism, or gender, or justice, Black studies scholarship continues to denude how antiblackness is the normalized exception upon which Western politics, theories, and institutions are erected.[32] For example, Alexander Weheliye deconstructs the analytic failures of Eurocentric biopolitical theory—the breakdown of the breakdown—particularly how Giorgio Agamben’s bare life and Foucault’s biopolitical racism assume pained flesh to be an exercise of exceptional power. Following Saidiya Hartman, Weheliye demonstrates the regularity of the brutalization of (black) flesh under colonialism and slavery.[33]

Finally, land as biopolitical also draws upon global studies of biopiracy and of neoliberalism. Kalindi Vora breaks with Marx to insightfully describe how Global South human organs, time, intelligence, social life, and biological life functions are tapped to support cosmopolitan “life” in the Global North. “Vital energies” are drained and redirected to perform liberal “life support.”[34] This moves away from the anthropocentric sense of “biopolitical” as principally referring to the control of life/death for human populations, when the very methods of life/death involve the bleeding of Indigenous worlds to pump life into a “First World.”