Leading sustainable development discourses construct biodiversity as a global resource intended to fit into intellectual property systems and world markets.  Large biomedical and agricultural research ventures claim a central role in advancing worldwide development and valuing biodiversity.  Intellectual property rights over life forms and processes spread as the mechanism to support such large biotechnological endeavours, which promise agricultural and medical development for all humankind.  However, field research in the Andes and Amazonia discloses that biodiversity is a crucial local process, rather than a global resource.  Local ecological practices construct collective biodiversity flows that care for food security, health care, and ecosystem resilience alike.  By constructing biodiversity as a global resource predetermined to both markets and intellectual property systems, the global developmentalism neglects and therefore undermines important local regimes of biodiversity.  Many native ecosystems that fulfill a crucial role as spaces of contextualised management and research on biodiversity are just regarded as biodiversity marketplaces.  This paper questions the ability of global intellectual property rights over life forms to improve the livelihood and development of the powerless indigenous and peasant people.  Instead, the cross-cultural expansion of the public domain over biodiversity flows and biotechnological processes seems a critical task.