Paraguayan Indigenous Communities Prepare Bill to Protect Intellectual Property Rights Over Traditional Knowledge

By BKM | BERKEMEYER

Indigenous peoples of Paraguay, together with civil society organizations and state entities, are preparing a preliminary bill aimed at securing intellectual property protection for their traditional knowledge and safeguarding their ancestral practices. The initiative was announced on September 2, 2026, by Tina Alvarenga, executive secretary of the Articulación de Mujeres Indígenas del Paraguay (MIPY), during a public forum held at the Spanish Cultural Center in Asunción with support from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID). According to Alvarenga, the draft has been in development for the past four years and is currently in a process of consultation and socialization with the country's various indigenous ethnic groups.

The bill responds to what organizers describe as a significant gap in the legal protection of traditional knowledge, particularly regarding traditional medicine and its use by pharmaceutical laboratories, which incorporate such knowledge into commercial products—capsules, pills, and creams—without indigenous communities receiving recognition or economic benefit in return. A frequently cited example is the global commercialization of stevia, a natural sweetener derived from a plant that the Guaraní indigenous people of Paraguay have traditionally called ka'a he'ê ("sweet herb") and used long before the arrival of Spanish colonizers, raising questions about the ownership of patents derived from knowledge that originated within an indigenous community.

Romina Rojas, a rapporteur at Paraguay's National Directorate of Intellectual Property (DINAPI), stated that the bill draws substantially on the knowledge held by indigenous women, whom she described as central to sustaining the structures that gave rise to this traditional knowledge. She added that, in addition to medicinal knowledge, the proposed legislation would also extend intellectual property protection to traditional fishing techniques and food preservation methods. The draft currently comprises approximately 63 articles and remains under review before it can be formally submitted to the Paraguayan Congress.

The renewed momentum behind the bill is directly linked to developments at the international level. In May 2024, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) adopted a treaty requiring patent applicants to disclose whether the genetic resources or associated traditional knowledge underlying their claimed invention were obtained from an indigenous people or local community. This WIPO instrument—the Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge—provided a new international framework that has informed the drafting process of the Paraguayan bill, according to Rojas.

The bill has not yet been formally submitted to the Paraguayan legislature and remains in the consultation phase with indigenous communities across the country. Its future progress will depend on the outcome of this socialization process and, subsequently, on its introduction and debate within Congress.