The reliance of northern economies on southern biodiversity: biodiversity as information

Abstract This paper addresses the issue of how biodiversity is used as an input into important industrial research and development processes. Biodiversity should be seen as an important source of a stock of information on which these research and development processes are built. This stock of information is of the nature of an economic asset that depreciates as the environment creates new problems, creating the need for a continual and perpetual supply of new information. Results are reported from a survey of the agricultural research and development industry, demonstrating how the environment engenders new problems in a systematic fashion and how the industry makes recourse to biological diversity for stocks of information to address those problems. The rate at which biological diversity is input into the research and development process is indicative of the extent of the reliance of this northern-based industry on southern-based biodiversity. This reliance is very substantial and the elimination of biodiversity could be disastrous for these important industries in the near term.