After Nagoya: What Benefit-Sharing Actually Requires

“The Nagoya Protocol exists. 138 countries have ratified it. Its enforcement is weak, its scope excludes prior exploitation, and the communities it's designed to protect remain largely unaware of its provisions.”

The Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing entered into force in October 2014 after four years of negotiation under the Convention on Biological Diversity. As of 2026, 138 countries have ratified it. Its core obligation: companies and researchers who access genetic resources or traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources from signatory countries must share benefits with the provider country and, where applicable, the indigenous communities of origin.

The Protocol is the international legal implementation of the argument Narby makes in The Cosmic Serpent: that indigenous communities have a legitimate claim to benefit from commercial exploitation of knowledge they developed and stewarded.

The gap between the Protocol and its implementation is large. A 2018 review by Wynberg and Laird in Ambio examined Nagoya's first four years and found: most provider countries lacked the domestic legislation to implement its provisions; most companies remained unaware of or non-compliant with their obligations; indigenous communities in most signatory countries had received no benefit-sharing payments under the Protocol despite continued commercial exploitation of traditional knowledge.

The Protocol explicitly does not apply retroactively, it covers access and exploitation that occurs after its entry into force. This means that the decades of ethnobotanical exploitation that produced current pharmaceutical products, including the ayahuasca-derived compounds in clinical development, are outside its scope. Historical exploitation is not addressed.

For the psychedelic industry specifically: the compounds in clinical development (psilocybin, ibogaine, DMT-based ayahuasca) are all derived from or structurally related to compounds used by indigenous communities for millennia. The Nagoya Protocol's benefit-sharing requirements apply to new commercial development of these compounds where traditional knowledge is accessed. Enforcement of these requirements in practice has been minimal.

Narby's argument, that the sacred cannot be sold without cost to the communities that stewarded it, has partial legal expression in the Nagoya Protocol. The distance between the legal expression and the practical reality is the ongoing policy failure that the Protocol was designed to address.

Sources

• Nagoya Protocol on ABS (2010, in force 2014)
• Wynberg & Laird, Trends in Biotechnology (2018)
• UNCTAD, Access and Benefit Sharing in Practice (2023)