SEVERAL studies have been revealing prospects of capitalizing on native knowledge and traditional cultures in order to launch new market products, such as drugs, cosmetics, new materials, foods, seeds and preservers. The market has adopted the practice of appropriating such cultural goods, which after slight adaptation are registered and turned out as patent-protected products and sold even to the countries where that knowledge was first developed, south of the equator as a rule. Vis-à-vis the social and evironmental degradation scale, as is the case of the Amazon area, a new optimism has risen: the hope that financial results from such products could benefit the native peoples, through the alteration of international legislation and the association of producers cooperatives with transnational companies. The market, the main opponent of bio- and sociodiversity, would thus be invited - both producers and consumers - to support the maintenance of the standing forest and cultural difference, for example, by means of origin certificates. Nevertheless, many are the obstacles preventing the native peoples from making a breakthrough either in the market or in the patent registration international systems vis-à-vis the capital and technology concentration logic.
