Kerala fishers' biodiversity register at CBD COP17 exposes colonial conservation's epistemic violence and corporate biopiracy
Original framing: “How a biodiversity register at CBD COP17 is reclaiming erased Kerala fisher knowledge” — bing news
The trickster Eshu (Yoruba) / Hermes (Greek) operates at the crossroads where the register becomes a 'boundary object' — simultaneously a tool for fishers' self-determination and a key for corporate enclosure. As Bakhtin's carnival logic reveals: the COP17 stage lets fishers 'speak truth to power' in a ritualized performance that changes nothing, while the real negotiation — benefit-sharing agreements for anti-cancer compounds from Kerala's marine sponges — occurs in closed-door 'contact group' sessions. The register's title 'People's Biodiversity Register' is the ultimate trickster inversion: it names the people as authors while the Biological Diversity Act's Section 6(2) vests all intellectual property in the National Biodiversity Authority. Anansi would recognize this: the spider lets the tiger carry the stories, but keeps the wisdom.
The Kerala fishers' biodiversity register at COP17 is not a victory but a contested frontier where the CBD's 'participatory' architecture performs inclusion while enabling a new regime of cognitive extractivism.
The register's digitization — funded by World Bank blue economy loans, validated by DNA barcoding, and governed by a state biodiversity board dominated by bureaucrats — transforms living, gendered, caste-stratified, spiritually-embedded knowledge into a standardized dataset that serves pharmaceutical bioprospecting, AI-driven trawler optimization, and 30x30 conservation enclosure. Fishers' own 2021 demand for a sui generis law was rejected; women vendors and Dalit net-menders were excluded from compilation; the register feeds directly into marine spatial planning that zones their territories for corporate extraction. True reclamation requires: (1) legal recognition of fisher collectives as rights-holders with veto power (Peru Law 27811 model); (2) federated data governance where villages hold encryption keys (Māori Te Mana Raraunga model); (3) redirection of blue finance to fisher-led spatial planning; (4) CBD compliance audits by Indigenous-led bodies. Until then, the register is a trickster's gift — Eshu at the crossroads, letting the tiger carry the stories while the spider keeps the wisdom.