Access and benefit sharing arrangements on African ginger with local and indigenous communities in Mpumalanga province

Abstract

Access and benefit sharing (ABS) is the sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of natural resources. In this study, the concept was used to include indigenous local communities and their indigenous knowledge associated with African ginger. The access and benefit sharing term emerged as a solution to fight un-equal sharing of benefits which occurred between researchers, government, bioprospectors, and indigenous knowledge holders. African ginger has gained much interest and is already in the market. Hence, there is a need for access and benefit sharing arrangement. Based on the above, this study focused on the access and benefit sharing arrangements on African ginger with local and indigenous communities in Mpumalanga Province of South Africa. This study was composed of three objectives. The first objective was to profile and document the characteristics of African ginger stakeholders in Mpumalanga. The second objective was to investigate the traditional uses and benefits associated with African ginger. The third objective was on the views and perspective of indigenous local communities based on ABS . To achieve the mentioned objectives, the policies and regulations implemented nationally and internationally were used as a reference. Using the labour theory and personhood theory in clearly proved that indigenous local communities have power over their knowledge and resources and once lost it is like they lost themselves in the process. The findings on the identification of stakeholders revealed that majority of African ginger stakeholders are involved with the research and commercialization of African ginger, this raised concern with regard to the conservation of African ginger. There were many uses of African ginger although some of the participants did not want to reveal their knowledge on the use of African ginger, this too had an impact in the study. The participants were questioning on how the university ensures that the knowledge does not go to the outside world. The study discovered that the traditional health practitioners and knowledge holders knew nothing about the existence of the benefit sharing arrangements on African ginger which was uploaded on the government gazette notice number 37582 dated 23 April 2014 (DEA, 2014). From this issue it can be concluded that the government must come with an approach of notifying indigenous local communities about existing access and benefit sharing

arrangements or allowing them to be part of benefit sharing agreement negotiations so that their voices can be heard.