Latin America’s greatest wealth is its biodiversity.
This is wealth in an aesthetic, ethical and emotional sense, and it also holds the potential to become a great material wealth capable of improving the living conditions of Latin Americans.
The sustainable use of this biodiversity represents an opportunity to radically change the current scenarios of dependency faced by the peoples of the Global South. This requires strengthening the sovereignty of Latin American peoples over natural resources and over the technologies that give these resources a multiplier effect, while at the same time preserving biodiversity itself. In other words, what is needed is a use of biodiversity that avoids extractivism and colonialism.
The technologies developed over the past 50 years for the sustainable use of biodiversity are evolving rapidly, and some of them allow for technological democratization, with potential for application by relatively disadvantaged countries. However, technological dependency and colonial threats over resources—and, above all, over genomic, chemical, structural, functional and geolocation information, as well as associated traditional knowledge—remain enormous challenges.
This symposium proposes to address, from various angles, the following questions:
– How can biotechnologies be implemented that, while valorizing natural resources, preserve or even increase biodiversity in Latin America?
– How can secure systems be established for the generation, storage, distribution and fair use of information associated with natural resources, while maintaining sovereign control over such information?
– How can the wealth and biotechnological valorization of biodiversity in Latin America be brought to the people?
