Such a distinction

becomes important where there are different laws promising benefit sharing to farming communities in the context of “farmers rights”, on the hand, and to communities more generally (or to indigenous communities under laws for the protection of indigenous peoples) for biodiversity related knowledge on the other hand. In India, for example, there are such overlaps between the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act and the Biological Diversity Act and they may potentially lead to repeated requests for compensation (Sagar 2005, pp. 386–387). This potential for overlaps is acknowledged in Article 5.1 (d) ITPGR, which speaks of the efforts of Pevonedistat solubility dmso indigenous and local communities in conserving wild crop relatives and wild plants for food production. The lines, however, remain difficult

to draw. Forsyth and Walker (2008, p. 63) in their work on Thailand, for example, explain that the previous dichotomy between lowland farmers and forest conserving tribal people in the uplands and their various forms of associated knowledge is not or no longer accurate. Both lowland farmers and hill tribe people have long begun to supplement their livelihood with income sourced from outside of their “traditional” living spaces. Hill tribe people have begun to work as agricultural labourers on lowland farms in surrounding villages. At the same time, lowland farmers are engaging in part-time selleck chemicals supplementary swidden agriculture in the uplands,

with some of them also cultivating fruit orchards and irrigated paddy fields. The authors conclude that in fact ‘“lowland” Thai are probably the majority in the uplands’ (Forsyth and Walker 2008, pp. 60–63, 222). It appears that an often essentialising but at the same time blurry picture of the “indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles” poses one of the fundamental problems for community focused models of environmental governance as envisaged in the CBD and in the proposals developed by international organisations such as the WIPO IGC. There are often simplifying assumptions about the homogeneity of communities, about the relatively unchanged nature Methocarbamol of their cultures and their conservation practices and about the relatively clear delineations of the geographical space that they inhabit. Critics have argued that “despite the persistence of the commons methaphor” in the environmental governance debate often “local conditions and local cultures conveniently disappear from the view” (Goldman 1998, p. 5) and that approaches emphasising community based research management “increasingly rely on stereotypical symbols of cultural difference that tend to associate particular ecological niches with particular forms of culture, knowledge and identity” (Forsyth and Walker 2008, p. 63).