NATURE EDITORIAL
12 November 2019
Global lessons from South Africa’s rooibos
compensation agreement
Indigenous communities must be compensated for their knowledge and
treated as equals in research.
The San communities of southern Africa have drawn up a code of
ethics for researchers.Credit: Eric Lafforgue/Gamma-Rapho via Getty
Nine years. That’s how long it took representatives of South
Africa’s rooibos tea industry to agree to compensate the Indigenous
San and Khoi communities for their peoples’ contribution to the
development of the 500-million-rand (US$33.6-million) industry.
It is a landmark agreement — the first such deal that applies to
an entire industry — but it should not have taken so long to
complete, and it could have been negotiated without some of the
recriminations now being heard. Whereas the Indigenous communities
and the government — which brokered the deal — are celebrating,
industry isn’t, and says that the agreement could threaten jobs.
Researchers whose work involves collaborating with Indigenous
communities will be wondering what they can learn from this case. One
important lesson is that there are more harmonious ways to work
collaboratively with Indigenous communities.
One reason why the rooibos agreement was nine years in the making
is that tea-industry representatives, concerned about risks to their
intellectual property, contested the communities’ claim that
rooibos tea is based on centuries-old Indigenous knowledge of the
plant. That led to a prolonged stalemate between the two sides.
San community representatives first wrote to South Africa’s
government in 2010 arguing that, under the law, they are entitled to
a share in the tea industry’s profits because it had used their
traditional knowledge.
The communities felt they had a good case: the rooibos plant
(
Aspalathus linearis) is endemic to South Africa’s Cederberg
region, which was inhabited by San and Khoi communities long before
settlers from Europe forcibly took their lands. The government
commissioned a
review of
the historical and ethnobotanical literature, which concluded in 2014
that there is a strong probability that rooibos tea had Indigenous
origins, and said that there was nothing in the literature to
contradict the community’s claims.
The industry had reservations about these findings, arguing that
there is little published scientific evidence that explicitly states
that the ancestors of today’s San and Khoi communities were the
first to brew rooibos teas. It went on to commission its own
study,
which supported its side of the argument — and added another three
years to the timeline.
Two studies reviewing essentially the same historical literature
and coming to different conclusions is not unusual. Records of
historical events — and even records of recent ones — are often
open to interpretation. But however the research is interpreted,
there’s a moral case to compensate long-mistreated groups. The
government advised the tea industry that it needs to pay the
communities, which will receive 1.5% of the ‘farm gate price’ —
that paid by agribusinesses for unprocessed rooibos.
Research and commerce have different reasons for wanting access to
traditional knowledge, but both have the ability to do so without
sharing the credit or the potential benefits with those who generated
it. This is what concerns the Indigenous communities the most and was
the motivation, two years ago, for the San communities’ production
of a
code of ethics for
researchers. The code urges scientists to be up front about their
intentions, to follow through on promises to share publication credit
and, where possible, to build community capacity for Indigenous
groups to do their own studies.
The ethics code and the rooibos agreement are small steps towards
a bigger demand: that Indigenous people, especially those whose
ancestors lost lives, land and livelihoods during more than a century
of exploitation, are treated fairly and as equals.
When researchers work with communities as partners, all sides can
expect to enjoy more constructive relationships and to benefit from
knowledge. Industry must do the same.
Nature
575, 258 (2019)
doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-03488-2
