Intellectual property, traditional knowledge, and native biodiversity: convention and progression in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (Trans-Pacific Partnership or Partnership) is a major multilateral trade agreement between Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam that entered into force in December 2018. The Partnership, like many other bilateral, regional, and trans-regional trade treaties that have been enacted since the mid-1990s, is polemical, due in large part to its perceived effects on small scale agriculture, native biodiversity, and local and Indigenous peoples. Civil society criticisms have centred especially on how the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s provisions on intellectual property might encourage the privatisation of plants, seeds, and other genetic resources at the expense of customary practices. The present article analyses these provisions, while also discussing the treatment of traditional knowledge in the Partnership, which is relatively progressive in comparison to prior free trade agreements. The article concludes by deriving lessons that civil society activists, local and Indigenous communities, and domestic authorities could derive from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, towards the end of identifying policy space for the protection of traditional knowledge and native biodiversity.