AO: Osseo-Asare notes that benefit sharing as a model has over-emphasized local priority and has failed to acknowledge the widespread distribution of herbal knowledge. She argues that traditional medicine in African contexts may be more diffuse and less tied to regional environments than has often been assumed. Osseo-Asare questions the assumption that IK is local knowledge and argues that traditional medicine was shared across a wide range of communities and was relatively public. Taking a long view of plants in African history she suggests their wide circulation and adaptation within overlapping systems of belief and use and within linked ecological zones shows that similar recipes for the same plant across geographic areas point to more regional continuities than differences. (page 16). She proposes that biomedicine and African traditional healing have not only been complementary but were, in fact, adapted from one another (page 18).
Through legal tools based on economic principles like benefit- sharing contracts and agreements, researchers and companies have attempted to fulfil their obligations to affected groups - compensating groups for their innovations. However, as the work reveals, underlying such tools/agreement are individualist notions of the single authored innovator. (“the idea of indigenes with original and unique— albeit shared— communal knowledge still relied on the concept of priority so integral to the logic of patents for inventors.” 33) But Osseo-Asare shows that the mobility of both biological resources and people who might use or contain them made it difficult to assign benefits to individuals or communities (19)
“Benefit sharing from the profits of patents thus becomes a symbol of the drug industry’s debt to global communities rather than of retrospective justice for specific groups.” (69)
AO: Osseo-Asare (echoing Tilley) highlights how colonial networks allowed for the circulation of herbarium materials and information on their potential uses. French harvests of periwinkle and pennywort, Scottish documentation on Strophanthus, or Dutch collections of hoodia all relocated both plants and early recipes on their uses from African contexts to European ones (201)