(introduction...)

Advance payments and royalties are only part of a package of potential benefits that biologically rich countries can receive through contractual agreements with commercial or non-profit collectors and through the relationships expressed in these agreements. Non-monetary forms of compensation,⁷ most of which could not be bought at will, can include: provision of health care and medicine, education and related material, training in collection and specimen-identification techniques, screening and other aspects of drug discovery, sharing of lab results, opportunities to be co-authors of publications, herbarium specimens for national and local herbaria, contributions to institutional infrastructure, development of field guides and databases, field equipment, botanical literature, academic exchanges, research exchanges with contracting companies, research on source-country diseases, and the distribution of drugs at cost in countries of collection. (See Chapter V.)

Many of these non-monetary benefits grow out of the more informal relationships between collectors and in-country collaborators and so may not be explicitly defined in a legal contract between collectors and companies. As a result, the most immediate non-monetary gains for countries of collection tend to be in sciences and institution-building related to collectors' objectives.

This is not surprising, given the typical objectives of collecting institutions: to "increase the knowledge and capacity to obtain information about plants, particularly from tropical regions" (Lowry, Missouri Botanical Garden, pers. comm., 1992), "discover leads for drug development" (Soejarto, University of Illinois, pers. comm., 1992), or collect and broker samples for profit (Biotics, 1992).

However, some non-monetary benefits can be included in collecting contracts; the Draft Contract featured in Annex 2 includes provisions for scientific collaborations and exchanges, research on developing country diseases, and the sharing of lab results.