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Paper short abstract

This presentation interrogates how marine bioprospecting operations are stimulating visions of deep-sea ecosystems as standing-reserves of resources, and analyses the new High Seas Treaty as codifying a regime of genetic extractivism in the deep sea.

Paper long abstract

In the last decade, bioprospecting expeditions have started to reinvent the ocean as a global site of public and private practices of genomic extraction. Genomic and metagenomic data has been informing both marine science and marine conservation, and its relative importance is only increasing with recent studies calling for increased use of genomic studies of ocean biodiversity in planetary governance. Yet, the practice of genetic prospecting at sea is mediated in complex ways by unequal power relations. Operations of genetic prospecting of the global oceans increasingly contribute to the formation of a planetary biology, but by whom and for whom? The paper analyses recent shifts in the global regime governing the distribution of economic value resulting from growing operations of genetic prospecting in the high seas. Through a close analysis of diplomatic negotiations on the BBNJ, it examines how the uneven geographies of genetic prospecting have shaped the contours of the new legal regime, its conceptual foundation, and its constitutive ambiguities and contradictions. On the basis of this analysis, the ongoing push towards a planetary mapping of the ocean genome appears poised to further corporate concentration of resources and corporate control over global ocean and climate action. Despite the codification of limited benefit-sharing mechanisms, long-standing tendencies towards corporate concentration are unlikely to be reversed. Ultimately, the regulatory regime emerging from the BBNJ Treaty reinforces ‘genetic extractivism’: a global regime based on a financialised and instrumental vision of life, and infrastructures of rent-extraction centred on corporations in the Global North.