La Gobernabilidad de la Biodiversidad en Colombia: ¿TLC o CDB, quién controla el campo?

Abstract

The text examines how biodiversity in Colombia has become a strategic arena contested between two opposing frameworks: the Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which enables corporate appropriation of genetic resources by global powers such as the United States, and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which ostensibly protects national sovereignty and collective rights but has in practice been shaped by international organizations, NGOs, and biotechnology corporations. Through a historical reconstruction, Catalina Toro shows that the modern concept of biodiversity emerged in the United States in the 1980s as a scientific‑political project combining conservation, biotechnology, and geopolitical control, instrumentalizing traditional knowledge and Indigenous territories. The article argues that biodiversity governance functions as a global regime without a government, where ethical, environmental, and cultural discourses mask processes of biopiracy, privatization, and militarization of strategic ecosystems, particularly in megadiverse countries like Colombia, whose biological wealth becomes the object of competing interests among local actors, states, NGOs, and transnational companies.