Mr. Mhofu's ramshackle stand in Harare's Mupedzanhamo market is overloaded with animal horns, bones and feathers. The Zimbabwean healers want a share of any snake-bean profits, but they also want recognition. A practitioner should have been shown on the patent. Exacerbating the rancor and confusion is a murky legal situation. Zimbabwean intellectual-property law, like that of many developing countries, is vague on the subject of local plants and traditional medicinal recipes.
International law offers conflicting intellectual-property rules.
The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, which carries no enforcement mechanism, favors the Third World. It says that countries producing genetic resources and traditional knowledge upon which research is based ought to share in any payoff from the research. Zimbabwe and Switzerland have signed both agreements. The multicountry negotiations that just got under way in Geneva aim to resolve this contradiction, but the talks probably will take years. The United States Patent and Trademark Office in 1997 revoked a patent it had earlier granted to the University of Mississippi Medical Center for the use of turmeric in treating surgical and other wounds.