WITDRAAI, South Africa (August 23, 2002 4:53 p.m. EDT) - The slight, wizened man kneels in the sand and speaks of the long desert hunting treks of his youth, where his grandfather gave him the fleshy pulp of the hoodia cactus plant to stave off hunger and thirst.
"The bushmen are always in the bush so we know a lot," said David Kruipeir, 67, a traditional healer for the nomadic African people known as the San.
But the San have been wary of sharing their knowledge since their legal battle with the U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and a South African lab over plans to turn the hoodia into a new diet drug without acknowledging its discoverers.
"The lid must stay on the pot," Kruipeir said.
The case is one of several to be discussed at the World Summit for Sustainable Development as examples of the difficulties indigenous people encounter when they try to cash in on medicines they have used for generations.
The San, who number about 100,000, live in the region of the Kalahari Desert of southwest Africa where the hoodia, which they call Xhoba, is native.
Light green and covered in thorns, the plant grows in clumps and is roughly the same size and shape as a cucumber. For as long as the San can remember, the bitter-tasting plant has kept them from feeling hungry on long journeys when they have little other food or water.
Normally the patent system protects individual achievements before they become public knowledge. But indigenous people say the system should protect them for knowledge they contributed to the public domain.
The issue "is part of a pattern of being exploited relating to their lands, their rights. It can't be looked upon in isolation. It is an indigenous peoples' human rights issue," said Gerard Bodeker of Oxford University's Medical School and chairman of the Global Initiative for Traditional Systems of Health.
The San case started when researchers at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, a South African laboratory partly funded by the government, patented P57, the appetite suppressant derived from the hoodia, without acknowledging the San.
The lab then licensed P57 to the small British pharmaceutical company Phytopharm, which said the San clan that discovered the hoodia had died out, and subleased the patent to Pfizer.
Eventually that San clan, which had been relocated by the apartheid government but was very much alive, found out about the patent. After legal wrangling, an agreement on royalties was reached.
Richard Dixey, chief executive of Phytopharm, said there had been a misunderstanding about the clan's existence and praised the lab for coming to terms with the San.
"It's not an exploitation story," he said. "I don't think any party was trying to avoid a royalty-sharing agreement."
Roger Chennells, a lawyer representing the San, said if the drug hits the market, the clan's royalties could be substantial and would be distributed to the community, not individuals.
Folk remedies have greatly contributed to modern medicine. By some accounts, up to a quarter of present-day drugs can be traced to plants - and many of those came from traditional medicine.
The difficulty of translating traditional knowledge into Western medicine equitably has been a source of contention around the globe.
In India, the government is working to create a national database of plants used traditionally for medicinal purposes in a bid to head off any legal disputes. The American Association of the Advancement of Science is also working to create an international database of traditional plant knowledge.
In South African, at the Collaborating Center for Drug Policy at the University of Cape Town, researchers are working with traditional healers to develop anti-malarial drugs from local plants.
Together, the researchers and healers have drafted a plan to split related profits equally with the communities.
As for the San, although they remain annoyed that, in their view, they were almost swindled, they can't help but be amused by the prospect of Westerners using the hoodia plant to slim down.
"It wasn't used for that in my ancestors' days," Katerina Rooi, 69, said as she scrambled over sand dunes gathering hoodia stems.
