biopiracy
biopiracy noun: the appropriation of indigenous biomedical knowledge, especially by patenting naturally occurring substances.
Noun
biopiracy (uncountable)
- The appropriation of indigenous biomedical knowledge, especially by patenting naturally occurring substances.
- Capital now has to look for new colonies to invade and exploit for its further accumulation. These new colonies are, in my view, the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants, and animals. Resistance to biopiracy is a resistance to the ultimate colonization of life itself—of the future of...1997, Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: the plunder of nature and knowledge, South End Press, →ISBN, page 5
- […] Although most of the public demonstrations during that meeting were aimed at globalization in general (and labor and biopiracy issues in particular), they also focused on trade issues related to genetically modified foods.2003, Marion Nestle, Safe Food, University of California Press, →ISBN, page 237
Origin of biopiracy
From bio- + piracy, coined by Canadian environmentalist Pat Roy Mooney in the early 1990s.
Questions about biopiracy
- What does biopiracy mean?
- Biopiracy means the appropriation of indigenous biomedical knowledge, especially by patenting naturally occurring substances.
- What part of speech is biopiracy?
- Biopiracy is a noun.
Words near biopiracy in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: biopiracy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Neøn-biopiracy.wav.
Cite this entry: “biopiracy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/biopiracy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.