This chapter analyzes the North-South conflict in the domain of biodiversity in view of the Brazilian case. Within the North-South conflict, which increasingly seems to characterize international relations, the question of access to the genetic resources of tropical biodiversity and to the knowledge, innovations, and practices related to those resources, has acquired an increasing importance. The old causes of unsustainable exploitation of natural resources (timber, mining, extensive farming and cattle raising) have begun to be replaced by a new predatory force, high-tech predation, which manifests itself through science, whose procedures valorize operative control; through biotechnology, which seeks to get access to and to appropriate not biological organisms themselves, but their informational components; and through intellectual property rights, whose legal system seeks to confer legitimacy on the economic appropriation of resources.

In its first part, the chapter discusses how, after the "cibernetic turn," the techno-scientific culture got established as the sole valid reference through the key concept of information. The premise that nature is totally available to the processes of retrieval, processing, and storing of digital and genetic information establishes the cybernetic state-of-nature and the cybernetic state-of-culture. Thus, nature turns into raw material and life into genetic resources, at the same time that, on the other hand, traditional cultures become obsolete and seem to be condemned to disappear because they don't fit into the new paradigm.

In the second part, through an examination of bills about access to genetic resources and to related traditional knowledge that have been presented to the Brazilian Parliament since 1995, as well as legislation passed by the Executive, the chapter seeks to show how the political-juridical regulation of the issue reflects the conflicts of interests of the major actors involved (indigenous peoples and traditional communities, NGOs and environmental activists, transnational corporations, and the State) and how it favors economic exploitation to the detriment of the socio-environmental dimension, abetting high-tech predation.