The paper focuses in the increasing economic value biodiversity acquires with recent biotechnology s advances and how this is related to genetic resources access and intellectual property rights, specially when local and indigenous human communities have got this kind of resources in their territories.
Biodiversity refers to all living organisms and their genes.
It includes people of different races and cultures who live in a determined territory. Since new biotechnology and genetic engineering started, its importance has grown. The majority and most important biodiversity centres are in tropical and subtropical regions, where there have been developed original crops and agriculture started. Modern agriculture has not paid enough attention to biological diversity and it has led to more homogeneity and genetic erosion, because its aim has been to increase yields of a few useful crops. This seems to be more acute with the new transgenic crops, which apparently solve plague and yield problems, but are genetically poor.