From Global Enclosure to Self Enclosure: Ten Years After - A Critique of the CBD and the "Bonn Guidelines" on Access and Benefit Sharing

Since 1994, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has been promising "benefit sharing" to Indigenous Peoples in return for access to biodiversity (i.e., bioprospecting). During these ten years, Indigenous Peoples and farming communities have worked long and hard to realize this goal. Government's response has come in the form of the so-called "Bonn Guidelines." These guidelines turned the CBD into a global enclosure system instead of a benefit-sharing mechanism and they have undermined the historic resilience of Indigenous Peoples by encouraging curtailment of their customary systems of resource-exchange.