The Neem Patent That Fell: Biopiracy, Mwarubaini, and Who Owns Plant Knowledge

Ancestral Wisdom · Social Justice · Sacred Plants & Spiritual Wellness

A Tree the Whole Village Already Knew

In Kiswahili, neem is mwarubaini, from arubaini, the word for forty, because it is said to treat forty conditions. In Dholuo it is dwele. Kenya’s Standard newspaper has profiled a woman in Nyanza who learned from her mother to boil the leaves for fever, and reports the tree growing thick along the coast around Ukunda in Kwale County and across Nyanza and Western Kenya. A doctor at Kenyatta National Hospital told the paper that the bark, leaves, and seeds are all used to make herbal medicine, and that the roots, flowers, and fruits are used to manage various ailments too. Nearly every part of the tree, in other words, has a place in someone’s remedy.

We have written about the tree itself, its medicine and its place in East African homes, in Mwarubaini: The African Neem Tree That Has Always Been a Pharmacy. This piece asks a different question. What happens when the knowledge held by a tree’s people becomes someone else’s property on paper?

Neem is native to the Indian subcontinent, a point the experts quoted by The Standard make plainly. Africa made it its own. The same report notes that in parts of Nyanza many people know the tree first as firewood, as building poles for grass-thatched houses, and as charcoal, while others keep it close as a medicine chest. The paper’s sources add that the tree grows in abundance where the climate favors it, and that its seed oil is rich in fatty acids. Over generations, African communities learned where the tree grows best, which part to use for which purpose, and how to keep insects at bay. That learning is not written in a patent office. It lives in practice, in memory, and in the hands of women who teach their daughters.

What the Neem Patent Actually Claimed

The European patent at the center of this story is EP0436257, titled “Method for controlling fungi on plants by the aid of a hydrophobic extracted neem oil.” According to the patent record, it was filed in December 1990 by W.R. Grace and the United States Department of Agriculture, and granted by the European Patent Office in September 1994. It covered extracting oil from dried, coarsely ground neem seeds with a water-repelling solvent, producing an oil largely free of azadirachtin and salannin, two of the seed’s best-known compounds. The record describes that oil as able to repel insects from plant surfaces, prevent fungal growth, and kill insect and fungal pests at various stages of life. Tellingly, the patent’s own description of prior art opens by acknowledging that the neem tree has been used for centuries as a source of pesticides to which insects have not developed resistance.

Many later reports date the grant to 1995, the year the challenge was filed, but the patent record shows the grant in September 1994 and a formal opposition lodged in June 1995. The claim sounded technical. Its effect was simple. A company and a foreign government now held exclusive rights, across Europe, to a use of a tree that, in the words of the European Commission’s research news service, had been used in Indian agriculture, public health, and medicine for thousands of years.

A Coalition, One Tree, and a Decade of Challenge

The challenge came from a coalition. The European Commission’s CORDIS news service names the three opponents: the Green group in the European Parliament, led in 1995 by Magda Aelvoet; India’s Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology; and the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. The patent record lists the opposition in Aelvoet’s name on behalf of the Green group. Their argument was that nothing in the patent was new. The protective power of neem had been public knowledge in India long before any company sought a patent on it.

The opponents did not win quickly. CORDIS reports that the European Patent Office revoked the neem patent five years after it was awarded, and that the US Department of Agriculture and W.R. Grace appealed. By then the patent record listed a company called Thermo Trilogy among the current holders. On March 8, 2005, the appeal failed, and the patent record shows the revocation taking effect that day. CORDIS wrote that the decision brought the ten-year dispute to a close. It fell on International Women’s Day.

Aelvoet called the result “a victory for traditional knowledge,” and in the same statement described it as a victory for solidarity with the people of developing countries and with the organizations that had fought beside her for ten years. It is worth pausing on that word, solidarity. The case was won by people on two continents who refused to treat a village practice as unclaimed ground.

Why Traditional Knowledge Counted as Prior Art

A patent is supposed to reward something new and inventive. If the thing already exists in public knowledge, called prior art, the patent should not stand. In practice, examiners search documents: journals, earlier patents, published books. Knowledge carried in village practice and oral teaching was easy to overlook, and that blind spot is exactly where biopiracy lives.

The neem case showed that the blind spot could be corrected. CORDIS described it as the first time the European Patent Office had withdrawn a patent on the grounds of biopiracy, which it defines as patenting living resources or traditional knowledge and practices so that intellectual property restrictions apply to their use. Its account closes on the principle at stake: a patent application should be rejected if there is prior existing knowledge about a product. In formal patent language, what that existing knowledge undermines is a claim to novelty and inventive step. “Biopiracy” is the name for what such a failure exposes. Both framings matter, and together they explain why the case became a teaching story.

The victory had limits. It took a decade of opposition and appeal to undo one neem patent in one jurisdiction. And the imbalance behind it did not go away. CORDIS observed that the resources at stake in biopiracy come mostly from developing countries, while the patent applications come mostly from companies in developed countries. Most communities cannot mount that kind of fight. That is why prevention, not litigation, became the goal.

The Same Story on African Soil

Africa has lived its own versions of this story, and some of the most instructive unfolded in Kenya. The dispute there was over microbes rather than a tree. Strathmore University’s Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law, known as CIPIT, traces the Lake Bogoria case back to the mid-1980s, when a doctoral researcher studying the soda lakes of the Great Rift Valley arranged to send samples to laboratories abroad, because Kenyan universities lacked the equipment for the work. According to the Kenya Wildlife Service, the research permit covered study, not any commercial use of what was found.

One of the microbes collected from Lake Bogoria produced an enzyme that, CIPIT writes, was later used by Procter & Gamble in a line of Tide detergent. In 2004, the Kenya Wildlife Service, working with the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, sought a share of the proceeds from Procter & Gamble and the enzyme maker Genencor. Genencor denied any wrongdoing. The episode laid bare how easily a sample, taken under a research permit, can travel into a global product line without anyone asking the people who live beside the lake.

A decade later, CIPIT reported that residents around Lake Bogoria, the homeland of the Endorois community, had received KES 2.3 million in royalties after the Kenya Wildlife Service negotiated a separate deal with a Danish enzyme firm. Part of the money was reported to be going to bursaries for more than 200 local students. Local civil society groups also demanded full disclosure of the funds, a reminder that benefit-sharing is only as good as its transparency. CIPIT points as well to a benefit-sharing deal between a Cape Town firm and South Africa’s San and Khoi communities, evidence that this struggle stretches across the continent.

These cases are not identical to neem. But they share a pattern. Knowledge or living material leaves a community, is transformed in a laboratory abroad, and returns as a product the community must buy. We traced that same pattern in Ankole plant knowledge in Omwetango and the Midnight Root.

Nagoya, Kenya’s Laws, and a New Global Treaty

The world has slowly built rules around what the neem fighters demanded. The Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing, adopted on October 29, 2010 in Nagoya, Japan, under the Convention on Biological Diversity, entered into force on October 12, 2014, ninety days after the fiftieth ratification. It requires clear rules for prior informed consent and mutually agreed terms when genetic resources are accessed, and it extends those protections to traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources, asking countries to secure the consent of Indigenous and local communities and to keep in mind their own laws, procedures, and customary use. CIPIT notes that Kenya ratified the protocol in April 2014.

What makes Nagoya more than a statement of principle is its compliance side. Countries where genetic resources are used are expected to make sure those resources were obtained with prior informed consent, to cooperate when violations are alleged, and to monitor how resources are used after they leave the country that provided them, including through checkpoints along the chain from research to commercialization. On paper, that is exactly the kind of tracking that was missing when Lake Bogoria’s microbes traveled abroad.

Kenya went further at home. Its 2010 Constitution, as CIPIT explains, directs the state in Article 69 to protect intellectual property in, and indigenous knowledge of, biodiversity and the genetic resources of communities, and to ensure the equitable sharing of benefits from natural resources. The Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Cultural Expressions Act of 2016 gives communities rights over their knowledge and sets up a national repository. We looked at Kenya’s newer policy work in Kenya Just Made History.

The most direct heir to the neem case came on May 24, 2024, when WIPO member states adopted the Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge. It requires patent applicants to disclose the country of origin of genetic resources, or the Indigenous Peoples or local community that provided associated traditional knowledge, when a claimed invention is based on them. Its stated aim is to prevent patents from being granted in error for inventions that are not new or inventive. It comes into force three months after 15 countries have ratified or acceded to it.

The treaty is honest about its limits, and so should we be. Patent offices have no obligation to verify what applicants disclose. Apart from cases of fraud, no country should revoke a patent solely because an applicant failed to disclose. The treaty does not apply to applications filed before it takes effect. Its most promising idea may be the least dramatic: databases of genetic resources and associated knowledge, built in consultation with Indigenous Peoples and local communities, that patent examiners can search. In other words, the treaty would not by itself have undone a patent like the one on neem oil. What it could do is put the knowledge in front of an examiner before such a patent is ever granted.

What the Science Says, and Where It Is Thin

Honoring traditional knowledge does not mean overselling it. The strongest case for neem is agricultural. The patent record’s background notes that neem seed extracts, particularly those containing a compound called azadirachtin, are known to influence the feeding behavior, growth, and fertility of numerous insect species. The patent itself describes neem oil that repels insects and prevents fungal growth, and The Standard notes that neem is also used as an insecticide. In a sense, the patent office confirmed what farmers already knew: the tree protects crops.

For teeth and gums, neem twigs have long served as toothbrushes, a practice The Standard describes in Kenya. The same report carries a caution from a doctor at Kenyatta National Hospital: chewing raw twigs can cause stomach trouble, because the twigs are often contaminated with fungi. The Standard also summarizes research suggesting that a neem leaf gel applied to the teeth and gums for six weeks reduced plaque, while a two-week neem mouth rinse did not appear to reduce plaque or gingivitis. That is a newspaper summary rather than a systematic review, and it points in two directions. Promising, then, but not settled.

For skin and hair, The Standard reports that some people apply neem to kill head lice and to treat skin conditions and wounds, and it describes a study in which a neem-based shampoo killed head lice in children while staying gentle on the skin. The US National Institutes of Health’s LiverTox entry on neem oil points to a review in which more than 140 compounds were isolated from different parts of the tree, and it is candid about what remains unexplained, including why the oil has a long record of traditional use in Ayurvedic medicine alongside rare reports of serious poisoning. A long list of possibilities is not the same as proof that a remedy works, or is safe, in the human body.

Neem Oil Is Not for Swallowing

This part must be said clearly. Neem seed oil, also called margosa oil, can be poisonous when swallowed, and young children are most at risk. The same LiverTox database summarizes case reports of vomiting, drowsiness, severe metabolic acidosis, seizures, coma, liver failure, and death in infants and children, a pattern resembling Reye syndrome. One early report described 13 Malaysian children who began vomiting within minutes of being given the oil as a remedy. Some outbreaks may have involved contaminated oil, but the risk is real. The Standard’s medical sources add that neem taken by mouth during pregnancy can cause miscarriage, and that large doses or long use may harm the kidneys and liver. Keep neem oil and neem pesticides away from children, and never give neem oil by mouth to a baby or child.

What the Neem Fight Asks of Us Now

More than twenty years after the final ruling, the neem patent is still the case people cite when they talk about biopiracy. It proved that knowledge held in practice rather than print is real knowledge, and that a patent office can be made to see it. It also showed how much it costs to be seen. Treaties like Nagoya and the new WIPO agreement shift some of that burden onto the companies that profit, but they only work if communities know their rights and have the strength to use them.

At Ubuntu Village, we believe plant sovereignty begins with communities, not courtrooms. In Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, that means honoring the elders who carry this knowledge, supporting the young people who will inherit it, and insisting that when the world benefits from what our ancestors learned, the benefit flows home. Mwarubaini has always been a pharmacy. It was never for sale.

Know someone who loves neem? Share the story of the tree that stayed free.

Sources

• The Standard (Kenya). Mwarubaini, the wonder tree that cures 40 diseases. The Standard.
• European Patent Office record via Google Patents. EP0436257B1: Method for controlling fungi on plants by the aid of a hydrophobic extracted neem oil. Google Patents.
• CORDIS, European Commission (2005). EPO accepts biopiracy argument and revokes patent. CORDIS.
• CIPIT, Strathmore University (2014). Danish Firm Pays 2.3 Million Shillings in Royalties to Endorois Community for Lake Bogoria Enzyme. CIPIT.
• Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. About the Nagoya Protocol. CBD.
• Republic of Kenya (2016). Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Cultural Expressions Act, No. 33 of 2016. Kenya Law.
• World Intellectual Property Organization (2024). Summary of the WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge. WIPO.
• National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (2020). Margosa Oil. LiverTox, NCBI Bookshelf.

Related Reading

• Mwarubaini: The African Neem Tree That Has Always Been a Pharmacy
• Omwetango and the Midnight Root: Ankole Plant Knowledge the Pharmaceutical Industry Cannot Patent
• Kenya Just Made History: What the New Traditional Medicine Policy Means for Ancestral Plant Wisdom
• Our Grandmothers’ Pharmacy: Herbal Medicine as Ancestral Knowledge

I Am Because We Are. And Together, We Heal.