Medicinal Plants in Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico: What Has Been Done to Protect Traditional Knowledge from Biopiracy? a Review from an Indigenous Data Sovereignty Perspective

Mexico is a country that has vast biological richness, which has provided resources to satisfy the needs of different cultures that have developed in the nation. An example of this use is medicinal plants, since Indigenous People mainly have sought to recover their well-being through the elements that surround them in their natural environment. Thus, the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and plant species has strengthened over time, giving rise to various traditional medicine systems that are transmitted from generation to generation. However, these practices have also left the indigenous context due to the growing interest of public and private institutions in finding alternative treatments to allopathic medicine to address some current health crises. As a result, ethno-pharmacological data is usually published with such openness that it has been placed in a state of vulnerability to both plant genetic resources and ancestral knowledge; this is due to the growing commercial exploitation of such resources by the industry, generating a series of conflicts around intellectual property and the sovereignty of indigenous data. Under this context, this proposal examines the current state of property rights over phyto-therapeutic resources in the Yucatan Peninsula, with special emphasis on the current legal framework and its implications for indigenous peoples. Through an in-depth bibliographic review, topics related to legal and ethnobotanical issues will be addressed; exploring the tensions between commercial interests and collective rights. Likewise, the efforts of Mexican Indigenous Peoples (Maya to be precise) to protect their resources and traditional knowledge in a context of globalization and cultural dispossession will be mentioned from an IDS approach and under the CARE principles.