The connection between human rights and biodiversity is an often overlooked but an emerging aspect in the international human rights debate. Our natural environment, access to genetic resources and cultural patrimony, food sovereignty and the right to an environment free of pollutants are all basic human rights that remain unrecognized.
In the case of Mexico, we have witnessed the direct correlation between the widespread violation of fundamental human rights and the extensive destruction and appropriation of biodiversity. This reality, coupled with the resounding absence of legal recognition if indigenous rights, is a direct attack on the viability of biodiversity and traditional knowledge.
Genetic resources, primary materials (petroleum, timber, minerals) and traditional knowledge are extremely valuable, and Mexico is abundant with these resources. Mexican law and lawmakers have facilitated the exploitation of Mexico's natural resources and have sold it off for a pittance, often under the justification of national development.
The exploitation and appropriation of biodiversity and traditional knowledge without the concent of those with rights to the resources or hold the knowledge, better known as biopiracy, threatens all of Mexico, but especially the state of Chiapas, a region of first class biological resources.
Multinational organizations view Mexico as a giant biodiversity gold mine to be exploited or a testing ground for Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and so-called 'development projects' like the Fox Administration's Plan Puebla Panama (PPP), while claiming to end poverty and improve the standard of living, are displacing (forced, involuntary or economic) local communities and Indigenous Peoples. The PPP aims to convert Mesoamerica to a region of maquiladoras and strategic resource extraction.
