The Costa Rican private, nonprofit organization INBio often is held up as an example of public and private-sector cooperation for equitable, sustainable bioprospecting. When INBio was founded in 1989, the idea was to create an agency that would gather information about the country’s natural resources on the grounds that if more information were available, stakeholders would more readily conserve. The government, however, lacked the necessary funds, so the initiative went private. The bioprospecting area, under the direction of agronomist Ana Lorena Guevara, provides one way of funding the agency’s conservation initiatives by forging partnerships with industry. INBio stresses that the country’s natural resources are public property, and a percentage of income from contracts goes to the Costa Rican government. EcoAméricas correspondent Barbara Fraser spoke with Guevara in her office just outside San José about INBio’s experience and the lessons that other Latin American countries might learn from it. [Log in to read more]

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