After many twists and turns, MEPs decide today what sort of Transatlantic Trade and Investment deal (known as TTIP) they want the European Commission to negotiate on their behalf with the USA.

Negotiations were launched with many grand statements at the G8 Summit in Lough Erne in July 2013.

TTIP was to be Europe’s saviour from austerity and to be the blueprint for all future world trade, wherever it takes place in the world.

Two years on and negotiations have been far from smooth. It was always going to be challenging to find common ground between the EU and US on public procurement, financial services and agriculture.

But what has really got in the way has been the tremendous public opposition to TTIP itself. People do not want a trade deal which lowers hard won food, environmental and labour standards; weakens public services; or gives new powers to corporations to sue governments if public policy harms their profits (known as Investor State Dispute Settlement or ISDS).

What’s missing from TTIP – democratic accountability

Trade deals have traditionally been about lowering particular tariffs for imports and exports of goods from one country to another. Trade is not as simple as that any more and for TTIP tariffs are a tiny part of the negotiations because tariffs between the EU and US are virtually non-existent these days.

Trade in TTIP is about issues that are relevant and important to us all: from which services are publicly provided, to the safety of the food on our plates; from the regulations which keep us safe at work, to the very decisions governments can make in the best interests of us all. TTIP is so broad, we have every reason to be bothered about its contents.

But trade deals are not negotiated with any real democratic accountability. On TTIP we have seen democracy thwarted at every turn.

As a direct result of thousands of emails, tweets and public meetings, MEPs will decide today the sort of TTIP they want agreed. While MEPs are only agreeing a statement on TTIP which has no obvious part in the negotiating process, it will influence the way the European Commission proceeds with negotiations.

This is because once the negotiations are complete, MEPs will get a vote to accept or reject TTIP. The Commission must ensure it negotiates a deal which is likely to get accepted.

Some concessions – but too little, too late

Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee drafted a resolution on TTIP which he hoped MEPs would agree. This made some concessions but remained committed to the TTIP that is currently on the table. Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), one of the most controversial aspects of TTIP is still in. TTIP is still on.

Over 900 amendments were then submitted in the early stages of consultation. 13 of the Parliament’s committees called for ISDS to be removed from the deal. Yet ISDS remained in the draft resolution. On 9 June, the resolution was timetabled to be debated by MEPs. A range of amendments were tabled, including one to remove ISDS altogether.

With less than 24 hours to the vote, Parliament President Shultz and Lange used technicalities to pull the vote entirely. The real reason was that they could not control which way MEPs might vote, in particular there was increasing support for removing ISDS entirely.

Late last week, the vote on the resolution was rescheduled for today, along with a compromise amendment designed to take support away from anti-ISDS positions. This amendment addresses none of the fundamental issues with ISDS and adds additional costs to EU tax payers of running a new supranational ISDS court.

If MEPs agree to table the amendment many of the critical amendments on ISDS, including to remove ISDS altogether, will automatically be taken off the agenda. Given the balance of powers in the European Parliament, it is likely that the new amendment will be both tabled and passed.

This may be an admirable piece of footwork by Shultz and Lange but it is a travesty for democracy. MEPs have been denied a chance to amend the resolution and the voices of EU citizens have been ignored again as a result. This is not the first time.

Proceedings shrouded in extraordinary secrecy

TTIP is being negotiated in secret. Our elected representatives in the House of Commons are not allowed to see the draft negotiating texts. Our MEPs even had to hold a demonstration in the European Parliament before being granted permission to see these texts in January this year.

Even now they can only see the texts in a locked room if they have removed any possible recording devices, including their mobile phones, and signed a 14-page agreement to keep the contents secret.

When EU citizens have asked for the negotiating texts to be publicly available, the UK government and the European Commission argue that this would compromise the deal that could be done because EU and US negotiators need privacy to out manoeuvre each other.

However, the World Trade Organisation, far from a bastion of progressive social and economic policies, has an established practice of making negotiating texts in trade agreements publicly available with any text which is not yet agreed marked by square brackets. If the WTO can make texts for global trade deals publicly available with this simple practice, there is no justification for TTIP texts remaining secret.

A bill of corporate rights at the public expense

ISDS remains one of the most controversial aspects of TTIP. This is a parallel legal system only open to corporations which enables them to sue governments if public policy harms their profits.

Perhaps the most famous example is tobacco giant Philip Morris suing the Australian government over the future loss of profits as a result of new government policy to put tobacco products in plain packaging. There are numerous examples, often from the global south, where corporations have extracted billions from governments as a result of ISDS claims.

Even without damages, the average cost to a government sued in this way is $4 million. This is why 145,500 people (out of a total of 150 000) told the European Commission in its consultation on the issue that they wanted ISDS to be removed from TTIP.

In fact, although MPs have had little opportunity to scrutinise TTIP, the Business Innovation and Skills select committee made up of MPs from across political parties concluded that the case for ISDS has not been made. Yet ISDS is still in TTIP and the UK government is committed to it.

There is a little known clause in the EU’s constitution which allows EU citizens, independently and not through their MEPs and governments to propose legislation, if a million people across the EU call for it. This is known as the European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI).

When anti-TTIP campaigners launched an ECI calling for an end to TTIP negotiations, it was rejected on a technicality. While this is challenged in the European Court of Justice, a self-organised ECI was launched on the same principles in October 2014. Within two months a million signatures had been collected. To date 2.3 million people have given it their support. This would make it the largest and fastest ECI to gain support in history.

As a result of the imposition of crippling austerity policies on Greece and its recent rejection of them, democracy and the EU is already a hot topic this week. For the thousands of people opposed to TTIP, the systematic lack of democratic scrutiny and complete rejection of alternative perspectives on TTIP is yet another example of the EU’s inability to act in the interest of its citizens, favouring capitalist interests above all else.

Polly Jones is Head of policy and campaigns with Global Justice Now.

This article was originally published by by Global Justice Now.

In 2014, one rhino was killed every eight hours. That was in South Africa alone, where most of the world’s rhinos live. At this rate, rhino deaths may overtake births by 2016-2018, making the concept of the rhino’s extinction very real.

Spurred by this grim prospect, governments, businesses and governmental organizations have discussed a wide range of solutions to stop rhino poaching, the key driver of rhino mortality.

One proposal that recently generated a lot of interest is the manufacturing of synthetic rhino horn. The concept first reached the media limelight in 2012 when the company Rhinoceros Horn LLC launched a crowdfunding campaign to get the idea off the ground.

While that campaign failed, the idea has recently been rekindled by Pembient, a US-based company that describes itself as “the De Beers of synthetic wildlife products.”

This bioengineering start-up plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D-printed rhino horns. The company hopes this will help save rhinos by making synthetic horns cheaper to purchase than the real thing.

If it looks like rhino horn, smells like a rhino horn …

Pembient is looking to develop synthetic rhino horns that not only are genetically similar but feel and smell like the real thing, so much so that consumers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

To achieve this, the company has recently embarked on a crowdfunding effort to sequence the genome of the black rhino. Pembient hopes the first synthetic horns will hit the market about a year from now.

The question, though, remains: will it work? An examination of both consumer motivations and business models behind these types of ventures exposes some pitfalls.

The best available consumer research tells us that demand for rhino horn stems largely from the social status this perceived luxury product gives to its users, tied to the (erroneous) beliefs of its medical properties. How would synthetic rhino horn fit into this picture?

In terms of its luxury status, it is the rarity and high price of rhino horn that give it its allure. As such, it is unlikely that current consumers will turn to cheaper and commonly available options no matter how indistinguishable they may be to a lay audience, much the same way that the availability and lower price of cubic zirconia has not led to a crash of the diamond trade.

Diamonds carry a social value that while arbitrary keeps consumers willing to pay large premiums. Thus it seems unlikely that a cheaper synthetic alternative may replace the original product in the minds of the wealthy consumers driving the demand for rhino horn.

But will the punters buy it?

As far as traditional medicine goes, the push for alternative products has been tried before. Take bear bile, for example. Used in Asia for centuries as a part of traditional medicine, the trade in bear bile flourished in the 1970s with the advent of ‘bear farming’, in which bile is obtained from live bears.

The number of bears required to fill these farms became a threat to Asian bear populations. As a result governments, NGOs and businesses have worked for decades to promote a wide range of plant, animal and synthetic substitutes.

Yet there is little sign of the practice disappearing, with a minimum of 12,000 bears still being kept in legal and illegal bear farms in Southeast Asia. Several reasons have been put forward for this, from the preference of consumers for wild products to the reluctance of practitioners to prescribe alternatives.

Taking all this into account, it seems unlikely that this synthetic rhino horn will have an impact on the demand for the real deal. However, the circulation of a synthetic product that so closely resembles the real product could easily become the worst nightmare of enforcement agencies worldwide, as authorities will have a hard time distinguishing between synthetic and illegally obtained rhino horn.

Another related issue is that by making synthetic rhino horn widely available, Pembient faces some perverse incentives to perpetuate the idea that it has indeed some medical properties. After all, the company’s bottom line depends on there being demand for rhino horn.

This can undermine the work of conservation NGOs, traditional medicine practitioners and even governments, who have spent decades trying to break the link between rhino horn and traditional medicine.

An uneasy moral issue – who should benefit?

Beyond any potential impact this initiative may or may not have, the entire business case for this enterprise is underlined by a broader moral issue. Is it ethical for a US-based company to profit from a product based on genetic material coming from several developing countries, without a clear form of compensation?

History is riddled with cases of fortunes being made by companies in the West that have developed commercial ventures based on plants or animals from some of the world’s poorest corners without any compensation, in what has become known as biopiracy.

The rosy periwinkle, for example, a plant native only to Madagascar, was found to contain a chemical compound that is effective in treating several forms of cancer. Millions of dollars were made from the two drugs subsequently developed, yet no compensation was ever given to Madagascar. The list of similar cases goes on and includes the Neem tree, turmeric, basmati rice, Ayahuasca, Rooibos Tea, Quinine and Quinoa.

Rhino conservation is costly, with countries having to invest heavily in management and anti-poaching efforts. Yet rhinos are distributed across a number of developing countries with pressing needs around food security, health and education.

It would be hypocritical for the international community to ban the trade in rhino horn, thus denying rhino range countries a source of revenue, while allowing private companies from elsewhere to profit from the trade in a product based on the rhino’s genetic material.

It is clear that conservation is much in need of entrepreneurship and people willing to think outside of the box – just the kind of thinking that the people behind efforts to make synthetic rhino horn have demonstrated.

Yet the context around the trade in rhino horn is very complex and simple solutions that sound too good to be true often are.

Diogo Veríssimo is David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Georgia State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

After many twists and turns, MEPs decide today what sort of Transatlantic Trade and Investment deal (known as TTIP) they want the European Commission to negotiate on their behalf with the USA.

Negotiations were launched with many grand statements at the G8 Summit in Lough Erne in July 2013.

TTIP was to be Europe’s saviour from austerity and to be the blueprint for all future world trade, wherever it takes place in the world.

Two years on and negotiations have been far from smooth. It was always going to be challenging to find common ground between the EU and US on public procurement, financial services and agriculture.

But what has really got in the way has been the tremendous public opposition to TTIP itself. People do not want a trade deal which lowers hard won food, environmental and labour standards; weakens public services; or gives new powers to corporations to sue governments if public policy harms their profits (known as Investor State Dispute Settlement or ISDS).

What’s missing from TTIP – democratic accountability

Trade deals have traditionally been about lowering particular tariffs for imports and exports of goods from one country to another. Trade is not as simple as that any more and for TTIP tariffs are a tiny part of the negotiations because tariffs between the EU and US are virtually non-existent these days.

Trade in TTIP is about issues that are relevant and important to us all: from which services are publicly provided, to the safety of the food on our plates; from the regulations which keep us safe at work, to the very decisions governments can make in the best interests of us all. TTIP is so broad, we have every reason to be bothered about its contents.

But trade deals are not negotiated with any real democratic accountability. On TTIP we have seen democracy thwarted at every turn.

As a direct result of thousands of emails, tweets and public meetings, MEPs will decide today the sort of TTIP they want agreed. While MEPs are only agreeing a statement on TTIP which has no obvious part in the negotiating process, it will influence the way the European Commission proceeds with negotiations.

This is because once the negotiations are complete, MEPs will get a vote to accept or reject TTIP. The Commission must ensure it negotiates a deal which is likely to get accepted.

Some concessions – but too little, too late

Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee drafted a resolution on TTIP which he hoped MEPs would agree. This made some concessions but remained committed to the TTIP that is currently on the table. Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), one of the most controversial aspects of TTIP is still in. TTIP is still on.

Over 900 amendments were then submitted in the early stages of consultation. 13 of the Parliament’s committees called for ISDS to be removed from the deal. Yet ISDS remained in the draft resolution. On 9 June, the resolution was timetabled to be debated by MEPs. A range of amendments were tabled, including one to remove ISDS altogether.

With less than 24 hours to the vote, Parliament President Shultz and Lange used technicalities to pull the vote entirely. The real reason was that they could not control which way MEPs might vote, in particular there was increasing support for removing ISDS entirely.

Late last week, the vote on the resolution was rescheduled for today, along with a compromise amendment designed to take support away from anti-ISDS positions. This amendment addresses none of the fundamental issues with ISDS and adds additional costs to EU tax payers of running a new supranational ISDS court.

If MEPs agree to table the amendment many of the critical amendments on ISDS, including to remove ISDS altogether, will automatically be taken off the agenda. Given the balance of powers in the European Parliament, it is likely that the new amendment will be both tabled and passed.

This may be an admirable piece of footwork by Shultz and Lange but it is a travesty for democracy. MEPs have been denied a chance to amend the resolution and the voices of EU citizens have been ignored again as a result. This is not the first time.

Proceedings shrouded in extraordinary secrecy

TTIP is being negotiated in secret. Our elected representatives in the House of Commons are not allowed to see the draft negotiating texts. Our MEPs even had to hold a demonstration in the European Parliament before being granted permission to see these texts in January this year.

Even now they can only see the texts in a locked room if they have removed any possible recording devices, including their mobile phones, and signed a 14-page agreement to keep the contents secret.

When EU citizens have asked for the negotiating texts to be publicly available, the UK government and the European Commission argue that this would compromise the deal that could be done because EU and US negotiators need privacy to out manoeuvre each other.

However, the World Trade Organisation, far from a bastion of progressive social and economic policies, has an established practice of making negotiating texts in trade agreements publicly available with any text which is not yet agreed marked by square brackets. If the WTO can make texts for global trade deals publicly available with this simple practice, there is no justification for TTIP texts remaining secret.

A bill of corporate rights at the public expense

ISDS remains one of the most controversial aspects of TTIP. This is a parallel legal system only open to corporations which enables them to sue governments if public policy harms their profits.

Perhaps the most famous example is tobacco giant Philip Morris suing the Australian government over the future loss of profits as a result of new government policy to put tobacco products in plain packaging. There are numerous examples, often from the global south, where corporations have extracted billions from governments as a result of ISDS claims.

Even without damages, the average cost to a government sued in this way is $4 million. This is why 145,500 people (out of a total of 150 000) told the European Commission in its consultation on the issue that they wanted ISDS to be removed from TTIP.

In fact, although MPs have had little opportunity to scrutinise TTIP, the Business Innovation and Skills select committee made up of MPs from across political parties concluded that the case for ISDS has not been made. Yet ISDS is still in TTIP and the UK government is committed to it.

There is a little known clause in the EU’s constitution which allows EU citizens, independently and not through their MEPs and governments to propose legislation, if a million people across the EU call for it. This is known as the European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI).

When anti-TTIP campaigners launched an ECI calling for an end to TTIP negotiations, it was rejected on a technicality. While this is challenged in the European Court of Justice, a self-organised ECI was launched on the same principles in October 2014. Within two months a million signatures had been collected. To date 2.3 million people have given it their support. This would make it the largest and fastest ECI to gain support in history.

As a result of the imposition of crippling austerity policies on Greece and its recent rejection of them, democracy and the EU is already a hot topic this week. For the thousands of people opposed to TTIP, the systematic lack of democratic scrutiny and complete rejection of alternative perspectives on TTIP is yet another example of the EU’s inability to act in the interest of its citizens, favouring capitalist interests above all else.

Polly Jones is Head of policy and campaigns with Global Justice Now.

This article was originally published by by Global Justice Now.

In 2014, one rhino was killed every eight hours. That was in South Africa alone, where most of the world’s rhinos live. At this rate, rhino deaths may overtake births by 2016-2018, making the concept of the rhino’s extinction very real.

Spurred by this grim prospect, governments, businesses and governmental organizations have discussed a wide range of solutions to stop rhino poaching, the key driver of rhino mortality.

One proposal that recently generated a lot of interest is the manufacturing of synthetic rhino horn. The concept first reached the media limelight in 2012 when the company Rhinoceros Horn LLC launched a crowdfunding campaign to get the idea off the ground.

While that campaign failed, the idea has recently been rekindled by Pembient, a US-based company that describes itself as “the De Beers of synthetic wildlife products.”

This bioengineering start-up plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D-printed rhino horns. The company hopes this will help save rhinos by making synthetic horns cheaper to purchase than the real thing.

If it looks like rhino horn, smells like a rhino horn …

Pembient is looking to develop synthetic rhino horns that not only are genetically similar but feel and smell like the real thing, so much so that consumers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

To achieve this, the company has recently embarked on a crowdfunding effort to sequence the genome of the black rhino. Pembient hopes the first synthetic horns will hit the market about a year from now.

The question, though, remains: will it work? An examination of both consumer motivations and business models behind these types of ventures exposes some pitfalls.

The best available consumer research tells us that demand for rhino horn stems largely from the social status this perceived luxury product gives to its users, tied to the (erroneous) beliefs of its medical properties. How would synthetic rhino horn fit into this picture?

In terms of its luxury status, it is the rarity and high price of rhino horn that give it its allure. As such, it is unlikely that current consumers will turn to cheaper and commonly available options no matter how indistinguishable they may be to a lay audience, much the same way that the availability and lower price of cubic zirconia has not led to a crash of the diamond trade.

Diamonds carry a social value that while arbitrary keeps consumers willing to pay large premiums. Thus it seems unlikely that a cheaper synthetic alternative may replace the original product in the minds of the wealthy consumers driving the demand for rhino horn.

But will the punters buy it?

As far as traditional medicine goes, the push for alternative products has been tried before. Take bear bile, for example. Used in Asia for centuries as a part of traditional medicine, the trade in bear bile flourished in the 1970s with the advent of ‘bear farming’, in which bile is obtained from live bears.

The number of bears required to fill these farms became a threat to Asian bear populations. As a result governments, NGOs and businesses have worked for decades to promote a wide range of plant, animal and synthetic substitutes.

Yet there is little sign of the practice disappearing, with a minimum of 12,000 bears still being kept in legal and illegal bear farms in Southeast Asia. Several reasons have been put forward for this, from the preference of consumers for wild products to the reluctance of practitioners to prescribe alternatives.

Taking all this into account, it seems unlikely that this synthetic rhino horn will have an impact on the demand for the real deal. However, the circulation of a synthetic product that so closely resembles the real product could easily become the worst nightmare of enforcement agencies worldwide, as authorities will have a hard time distinguishing between synthetic and illegally obtained rhino horn.

Another related issue is that by making synthetic rhino horn widely available, Pembient faces some perverse incentives to perpetuate the idea that it has indeed some medical properties. After all, the company’s bottom line depends on there being demand for rhino horn.

This can undermine the work of conservation NGOs, traditional medicine practitioners and even governments, who have spent decades trying to break the link between rhino horn and traditional medicine.

An uneasy moral issue – who should benefit?

Beyond any potential impact this initiative may or may not have, the entire business case for this enterprise is underlined by a broader moral issue. Is it ethical for a US-based company to profit from a product based on genetic material coming from several developing countries, without a clear form of compensation?

History is riddled with cases of fortunes being made by companies in the West that have developed commercial ventures based on plants or animals from some of the world’s poorest corners without any compensation, in what has become known as biopiracy.

The rosy periwinkle, for example, a plant native only to Madagascar, was found to contain a chemical compound that is effective in treating several forms of cancer. Millions of dollars were made from the two drugs subsequently developed, yet no compensation was ever given to Madagascar. The list of similar cases goes on and includes the Neem tree, turmeric, basmati rice, Ayahuasca, Rooibos Tea, Quinine and Quinoa.

Rhino conservation is costly, with countries having to invest heavily in management and anti-poaching efforts. Yet rhinos are distributed across a number of developing countries with pressing needs around food security, health and education.

It would be hypocritical for the international community to ban the trade in rhino horn, thus denying rhino range countries a source of revenue, while allowing private companies from elsewhere to profit from the trade in a product based on the rhino’s genetic material.

It is clear that conservation is much in need of entrepreneurship and people willing to think outside of the box – just the kind of thinking that the people behind efforts to make synthetic rhino horn have demonstrated.

Yet the context around the trade in rhino horn is very complex and simple solutions that sound too good to be true often are.

Diogo Veríssimo is David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Georgia State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In 2014, one rhino was killed every eight hours. That was in South Africa alone, where most of the world’s rhinos live. At this rate, rhino deaths may overtake births by 2016-2018, making the concept of the rhino’s extinction very real.

Spurred by this grim prospect, governments, businesses and governmental organizations have discussed a wide range of solutions to stop rhino poaching, the key driver of rhino mortality.

One proposal that recently generated a lot of interest is the manufacturing of synthetic rhino horn. The concept first reached the media limelight in 2012 when the company Rhinoceros Horn LLC launched a crowdfunding campaign to get the idea off the ground.

While that campaign failed, the idea has recently been rekindled by Pembient, a US-based company that describes itself as “the De Beers of synthetic wildlife products.”

This bioengineering start-up plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D-printed rhino horns. The company hopes this will help save rhinos by making synthetic horns cheaper to purchase than the real thing.

If it looks like rhino horn, smells like a rhino horn …

Pembient is looking to develop synthetic rhino horns that not only are genetically similar but feel and smell like the real thing, so much so that consumers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

To achieve this, the company has recently embarked on a crowdfunding effort to sequence the genome of the black rhino. Pembient hopes the first synthetic horns will hit the market about a year from now.

The question, though, remains: will it work? An examination of both consumer motivations and business models behind these types of ventures exposes some pitfalls.

The best available consumer research tells us that demand for rhino horn stems largely from the social status this perceived luxury product gives to its users, tied to the (erroneous) beliefs of its medical properties. How would synthetic rhino horn fit into this picture?

In terms of its luxury status, it is the rarity and high price of rhino horn that give it its allure. As such, it is unlikely that current consumers will turn to cheaper and commonly available options no matter how indistinguishable they may be to a lay audience, much the same way that the availability and lower price of cubic zirconia has not led to a crash of the diamond trade.

Diamonds carry a social value that while arbitrary keeps consumers willing to pay large premiums. Thus it seems unlikely that a cheaper synthetic alternative may replace the original product in the minds of the wealthy consumers driving the demand for rhino horn.

But will the punters buy it?

As far as traditional medicine goes, the push for alternative products has been tried before. Take bear bile, for example. Used in Asia for centuries as a part of traditional medicine, the trade in bear bile flourished in the 1970s with the advent of ‘bear farming’, in which bile is obtained from live bears.

The number of bears required to fill these farms became a threat to Asian bear populations. As a result governments, NGOs and businesses have worked for decades to promote a wide range of plant, animal and synthetic substitutes.

Yet there is little sign of the practice disappearing, with a minimum of 12,000 bears still being kept in legal and illegal bear farms in Southeast Asia. Several reasons have been put forward for this, from the preference of consumers for wild products to the reluctance of practitioners to prescribe alternatives.

Taking all this into account, it seems unlikely that this synthetic rhino horn will have an impact on the demand for the real deal. However, the circulation of a synthetic product that so closely resembles the real product could easily become the worst nightmare of enforcement agencies worldwide, as authorities will have a hard time distinguishing between synthetic and illegally obtained rhino horn.

Another related issue is that by making synthetic rhino horn widely available, Pembient faces some perverse incentives to perpetuate the idea that it has indeed some medical properties. After all, the company’s bottom line depends on there being demand for rhino horn.

This can undermine the work of conservation NGOs, traditional medicine practitioners and even governments, who have spent decades trying to break the link between rhino horn and traditional medicine.

An uneasy moral issue – who should benefit?

Beyond any potential impact this initiative may or may not have, the entire business case for this enterprise is underlined by a broader moral issue. Is it ethical for a US-based company to profit from a product based on genetic material coming from several developing countries, without a clear form of compensation?

History is riddled with cases of fortunes being made by companies in the West that have developed commercial ventures based on plants or animals from some of the world’s poorest corners without any compensation, in what has become known as biopiracy.

The rosy periwinkle, for example, a plant native only to Madagascar, was found to contain a chemical compound that is effective in treating several forms of cancer. Millions of dollars were made from the two drugs subsequently developed, yet no compensation was ever given to Madagascar. The list of similar cases goes on and includes the Neem tree, turmeric, basmati rice, Ayahuasca, Rooibos Tea, Quinine and Quinoa.

Rhino conservation is costly, with countries having to invest heavily in management and anti-poaching efforts. Yet rhinos are distributed across a number of developing countries with pressing needs around food security, health and education.

It would be hypocritical for the international community to ban the trade in rhino horn, thus denying rhino range countries a source of revenue, while allowing private companies from elsewhere to profit from the trade in a product based on the rhino’s genetic material.

It is clear that conservation is much in need of entrepreneurship and people willing to think outside of the box – just the kind of thinking that the people behind efforts to make synthetic rhino horn have demonstrated.

Yet the context around the trade in rhino horn is very complex and simple solutions that sound too good to be true often are.

Diogo Veríssimo is David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Georgia State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In 2014, one rhino was killed every eight hours. That was in South Africa alone, where most of the world’s rhinos live. At this rate, rhino deaths may overtake births by 2016-2018, making the concept of the rhino’s extinction very real.

Spurred by this grim prospect, governments, businesses and governmental organizations have discussed a wide range of solutions to stop rhino poaching, the key driver of rhino mortality.

One proposal that recently generated a lot of interest is the manufacturing of synthetic rhino horn. The concept first reached the media limelight in 2012 when the company Rhinoceros Horn LLC launched a crowdfunding campaign to get the idea off the ground.

While that campaign failed, the idea has recently been rekindled by Pembient, a US-based company that describes itself as “the De Beers of synthetic wildlife products.”

This bioengineering start-up plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D-printed rhino horns. The company hopes this will help save rhinos by making synthetic horns cheaper to purchase than the real thing.

If it looks like rhino horn, smells like a rhino horn …

Pembient is looking to develop synthetic rhino horns that not only are genetically similar but feel and smell like the real thing, so much so that consumers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

To achieve this, the company has recently embarked on a crowdfunding effort to sequence the genome of the black rhino. Pembient hopes the first synthetic horns will hit the market about a year from now.

The question, though, remains: will it work? An examination of both consumer motivations and business models behind these types of ventures exposes some pitfalls.

The best available consumer research tells us that demand for rhino horn stems largely from the social status this perceived luxury product gives to its users, tied to the (erroneous) beliefs of its medical properties. How would synthetic rhino horn fit into this picture?

In terms of its luxury status, it is the rarity and high price of rhino horn that give it its allure. As such, it is unlikely that current consumers will turn to cheaper and commonly available options no matter how indistinguishable they may be to a lay audience, much the same way that the availability and lower price of cubic zirconia has not led to a crash of the diamond trade.

Diamonds carry a social value that while arbitrary keeps consumers willing to pay large premiums. Thus it seems unlikely that a cheaper synthetic alternative may replace the original product in the minds of the wealthy consumers driving the demand for rhino horn.

But will the punters buy it?

As far as traditional medicine goes, the push for alternative products has been tried before. Take bear bile, for example. Used in Asia for centuries as a part of traditional medicine, the trade in bear bile flourished in the 1970s with the advent of ‘bear farming’, in which bile is obtained from live bears.

The number of bears required to fill these farms became a threat to Asian bear populations. As a result governments, NGOs and businesses have worked for decades to promote a wide range of plant, animal and synthetic substitutes.

Yet there is little sign of the practice disappearing, with a minimum of 12,000 bears still being kept in legal and illegal bear farms in Southeast Asia. Several reasons have been put forward for this, from the preference of consumers for wild products to the reluctance of practitioners to prescribe alternatives.

Taking all this into account, it seems unlikely that this synthetic rhino horn will have an impact on the demand for the real deal. However, the circulation of a synthetic product that so closely resembles the real product could easily become the worst nightmare of enforcement agencies worldwide, as authorities will have a hard time distinguishing between synthetic and illegally obtained rhino horn.

Another related issue is that by making synthetic rhino horn widely available, Pembient faces some perverse incentives to perpetuate the idea that it has indeed some medical properties. After all, the company’s bottom line depends on there being demand for rhino horn.

This can undermine the work of conservation NGOs, traditional medicine practitioners and even governments, who have spent decades trying to break the link between rhino horn and traditional medicine.

An uneasy moral issue – who should benefit?

Beyond any potential impact this initiative may or may not have, the entire business case for this enterprise is underlined by a broader moral issue. Is it ethical for a US-based company to profit from a product based on genetic material coming from several developing countries, without a clear form of compensation?

History is riddled with cases of fortunes being made by companies in the West that have developed commercial ventures based on plants or animals from some of the world’s poorest corners without any compensation, in what has become known as biopiracy.

The rosy periwinkle, for example, a plant native only to Madagascar, was found to contain a chemical compound that is effective in treating several forms of cancer. Millions of dollars were made from the two drugs subsequently developed, yet no compensation was ever given to Madagascar. The list of similar cases goes on and includes the Neem tree, turmeric, basmati rice, Ayahuasca, Rooibos Tea, Quinine and Quinoa.

Rhino conservation is costly, with countries having to invest heavily in management and anti-poaching efforts. Yet rhinos are distributed across a number of developing countries with pressing needs around food security, health and education.

It would be hypocritical for the international community to ban the trade in rhino horn, thus denying rhino range countries a source of revenue, while allowing private companies from elsewhere to profit from the trade in a product based on the rhino’s genetic material.

It is clear that conservation is much in need of entrepreneurship and people willing to think outside of the box – just the kind of thinking that the people behind efforts to make synthetic rhino horn have demonstrated.

Yet the context around the trade in rhino horn is very complex and simple solutions that sound too good to be true often are.

Diogo Veríssimo is David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Georgia State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In 2014, one rhino was killed every eight hours. That was in South Africa alone, where most of the world’s rhinos live. At this rate, rhino deaths may overtake births by 2016-2018, making the concept of the rhino’s extinction very real.

Spurred by this grim prospect, governments, businesses and governmental organizations have discussed a wide range of solutions to stop rhino poaching, the key driver of rhino mortality.

One proposal that recently generated a lot of interest is the manufacturing of synthetic rhino horn. The concept first reached the media limelight in 2012 when the company Rhinoceros Horn LLC launched a crowdfunding campaign to get the idea off the ground.

While that campaign failed, the idea has recently been rekindled by Pembient, a US-based company that describes itself as “the De Beers of synthetic wildlife products.”

This bioengineering start-up plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D-printed rhino horns. The company hopes this will help save rhinos by making synthetic horns cheaper to purchase than the real thing.

If it looks like rhino horn, smells like a rhino horn …

Pembient is looking to develop synthetic rhino horns that not only are genetically similar but feel and smell like the real thing, so much so that consumers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

To achieve this, the company has recently embarked on a crowdfunding effort to sequence the genome of the black rhino. Pembient hopes the first synthetic horns will hit the market about a year from now.

The question, though, remains: will it work? An examination of both consumer motivations and business models behind these types of ventures exposes some pitfalls.

The best available consumer research tells us that demand for rhino horn stems largely from the social status this perceived luxury product gives to its users, tied to the (erroneous) beliefs of its medical properties. How would synthetic rhino horn fit into this picture?

In terms of its luxury status, it is the rarity and high price of rhino horn that give it its allure. As such, it is unlikely that current consumers will turn to cheaper and commonly available options no matter how indistinguishable they may be to a lay audience, much the same way that the availability and lower price of cubic zirconia has not led to a crash of the diamond trade.

Diamonds carry a social value that while arbitrary keeps consumers willing to pay large premiums. Thus it seems unlikely that a cheaper synthetic alternative may replace the original product in the minds of the wealthy consumers driving the demand for rhino horn.

But will the punters buy it?

As far as traditional medicine goes, the push for alternative products has been tried before. Take bear bile, for example. Used in Asia for centuries as a part of traditional medicine, the trade in bear bile flourished in the 1970s with the advent of ‘bear farming’, in which bile is obtained from live bears.

The number of bears required to fill these farms became a threat to Asian bear populations. As a result governments, NGOs and businesses have worked for decades to promote a wide range of plant, animal and synthetic substitutes.

Yet there is little sign of the practice disappearing, with a minimum of 12,000 bears still being kept in legal and illegal bear farms in Southeast Asia. Several reasons have been put forward for this, from the preference of consumers for wild products to the reluctance of practitioners to prescribe alternatives.

Taking all this into account, it seems unlikely that this synthetic rhino horn will have an impact on the demand for the real deal. However, the circulation of a synthetic product that so closely resembles the real product could easily become the worst nightmare of enforcement agencies worldwide, as authorities will have a hard time distinguishing between synthetic and illegally obtained rhino horn.

Another related issue is that by making synthetic rhino horn widely available, Pembient faces some perverse incentives to perpetuate the idea that it has indeed some medical properties. After all, the company’s bottom line depends on there being demand for rhino horn.

This can undermine the work of conservation NGOs, traditional medicine practitioners and even governments, who have spent decades trying to break the link between rhino horn and traditional medicine.

An uneasy moral issue – who should benefit?

Beyond any potential impact this initiative may or may not have, the entire business case for this enterprise is underlined by a broader moral issue. Is it ethical for a US-based company to profit from a product based on genetic material coming from several developing countries, without a clear form of compensation?

History is riddled with cases of fortunes being made by companies in the West that have developed commercial ventures based on plants or animals from some of the world’s poorest corners without any compensation, in what has become known as biopiracy.

The rosy periwinkle, for example, a plant native only to Madagascar, was found to contain a chemical compound that is effective in treating several forms of cancer. Millions of dollars were made from the two drugs subsequently developed, yet no compensation was ever given to Madagascar. The list of similar cases goes on and includes the Neem tree, turmeric, basmati rice, Ayahuasca, Rooibos Tea, Quinine and Quinoa.

Rhino conservation is costly, with countries having to invest heavily in management and anti-poaching efforts. Yet rhinos are distributed across a number of developing countries with pressing needs around food security, health and education.

It would be hypocritical for the international community to ban the trade in rhino horn, thus denying rhino range countries a source of revenue, while allowing private companies from elsewhere to profit from the trade in a product based on the rhino’s genetic material.

It is clear that conservation is much in need of entrepreneurship and people willing to think outside of the box – just the kind of thinking that the people behind efforts to make synthetic rhino horn have demonstrated.

Yet the context around the trade in rhino horn is very complex and simple solutions that sound too good to be true often are.

Diogo Veríssimo is David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Georgia State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In 2014, one rhino was killed every eight hours. That was in South Africa alone, where most of the world’s rhinos live. At this rate, rhino deaths may overtake births by 2016-2018, making the concept of the rhino’s extinction very real.

Spurred by this grim prospect, governments, businesses and governmental organizations have discussed a wide range of solutions to stop rhino poaching, the key driver of rhino mortality.

One proposal that recently generated a lot of interest is the manufacturing of synthetic rhino horn. The concept first reached the media limelight in 2012 when the company Rhinoceros Horn LLC launched a crowdfunding campaign to get the idea off the ground.

While that campaign failed, the idea has recently been rekindled by Pembient, a US-based company that describes itself as “the De Beers of synthetic wildlife products.”

This bioengineering start-up plans to flood the market with synthetic 3D-printed rhino horns. The company hopes this will help save rhinos by making synthetic horns cheaper to purchase than the real thing.

If it looks like rhino horn, smells like a rhino horn …

Pembient is looking to develop synthetic rhino horns that not only are genetically similar but feel and smell like the real thing, so much so that consumers wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

To achieve this, the company has recently embarked on a crowdfunding effort to sequence the genome of the black rhino. Pembient hopes the first synthetic horns will hit the market about a year from now.

The question, though, remains: will it work? An examination of both consumer motivations and business models behind these types of ventures exposes some pitfalls.

The best available consumer research tells us that demand for rhino horn stems largely from the social status this perceived luxury product gives to its users, tied to the (erroneous) beliefs of its medical properties. How would synthetic rhino horn fit into this picture?

In terms of its luxury status, it is the rarity and high price of rhino horn that give it its allure. As such, it is unlikely that current consumers will turn to cheaper and commonly available options no matter how indistinguishable they may be to a lay audience, much the same way that the availability and lower price of cubic zirconia has not led to a crash of the diamond trade.

Diamonds carry a social value that while arbitrary keeps consumers willing to pay large premiums. Thus it seems unlikely that a cheaper synthetic alternative may replace the original product in the minds of the wealthy consumers driving the demand for rhino horn.

But will the punters buy it?

As far as traditional medicine goes, the push for alternative products has been tried before. Take bear bile, for example. Used in Asia for centuries as a part of traditional medicine, the trade in bear bile flourished in the 1970s with the advent of ‘bear farming’, in which bile is obtained from live bears.

The number of bears required to fill these farms became a threat to Asian bear populations. As a result governments, NGOs and businesses have worked for decades to promote a wide range of plant, animal and synthetic substitutes.

Yet there is little sign of the practice disappearing, with a minimum of 12,000 bears still being kept in legal and illegal bear farms in Southeast Asia. Several reasons have been put forward for this, from the preference of consumers for wild products to the reluctance of practitioners to prescribe alternatives.

Taking all this into account, it seems unlikely that this synthetic rhino horn will have an impact on the demand for the real deal. However, the circulation of a synthetic product that so closely resembles the real product could easily become the worst nightmare of enforcement agencies worldwide, as authorities will have a hard time distinguishing between synthetic and illegally obtained rhino horn.

Another related issue is that by making synthetic rhino horn widely available, Pembient faces some perverse incentives to perpetuate the idea that it has indeed some medical properties. After all, the company’s bottom line depends on there being demand for rhino horn.

This can undermine the work of conservation NGOs, traditional medicine practitioners and even governments, who have spent decades trying to break the link between rhino horn and traditional medicine.

An uneasy moral issue – who should benefit?

Beyond any potential impact this initiative may or may not have, the entire business case for this enterprise is underlined by a broader moral issue. Is it ethical for a US-based company to profit from a product based on genetic material coming from several developing countries, without a clear form of compensation?

History is riddled with cases of fortunes being made by companies in the West that have developed commercial ventures based on plants or animals from some of the world’s poorest corners without any compensation, in what has become known as biopiracy.

The rosy periwinkle, for example, a plant native only to Madagascar, was found to contain a chemical compound that is effective in treating several forms of cancer. Millions of dollars were made from the two drugs subsequently developed, yet no compensation was ever given to Madagascar. The list of similar cases goes on and includes the Neem tree, turmeric, basmati rice, Ayahuasca, Rooibos Tea, Quinine and Quinoa.

Rhino conservation is costly, with countries having to invest heavily in management and anti-poaching efforts. Yet rhinos are distributed across a number of developing countries with pressing needs around food security, health and education.

It would be hypocritical for the international community to ban the trade in rhino horn, thus denying rhino range countries a source of revenue, while allowing private companies from elsewhere to profit from the trade in a product based on the rhino’s genetic material.

It is clear that conservation is much in need of entrepreneurship and people willing to think outside of the box – just the kind of thinking that the people behind efforts to make synthetic rhino horn have demonstrated.

Yet the context around the trade in rhino horn is very complex and simple solutions that sound too good to be true often are.

Diogo Veríssimo is David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at Georgia State University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.