Biodiversity, countries with plant species

The access to plant biodiversity from natural habitats is fraught with legal complication, especially for broad-scale corporate campaigns involving the collection of hundreds, or even thousands, of species. Furthermore, many plants have been employed for ritual or medicinal uses and their commodification has sociological implications not addressed by IP considerations. The resolution of these issues, discussed in detail in the Chapter 4, is complicated by the asymmetry between biodiversity-rich developing nations and technology-rich Western countries. 

The American Medical Association (AMA) has estimated that in 1999, 200 million acres of land had been planted worldwide with transgenic crops. The AMA further indicated that over 25 000 field trials for environmental effects of GMOs had been performed in 45 countries without noted adverse environmental consequences. Despite these conclusions, the limited geographical size and comprehensiveness of such trials confounds definitive conclusions regarding the potential for adverse effects such as enhanced crop pest resistance, out crossing with weedy relatives of crops, reduced biodiversity, nutritional deficiency of food sources, and toxicity to nontarget species. 

With over 250,000 species, the plant kingdom contains biodiversity which reflects known and novel compounds with potential therajjeutic activity (2,82,83). Furthermore, the World Health Organization has estimated that 80% of people in developing countries are dependent upon plant-centered traditional medicines for their primary health care (84). The examples of quinine and artemisinin cited above illustrate the proven utility of compounds from plants in the treatment of malaria. Moreover, it is likely that additional plant-derived antimalarial drugs await discovery since the literature indicates that in vivo or in vitro antimalarial activities have been identified in a broad and varied spectrum of botanical families (85-92). 

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