The field was named in 1896 by the American botanist John William Harshberger, but the material it was named over had been accumulating for centuries in colonial administrations, mission stations and botanical surveys. Those records were compiled to find out what a territory contained and what could be got out of it. The discipline inherited both the data and the posture, and its history since has largely been an argument with the posture.
The specific charge is extraction. A researcher records that a community uses a plant for a condition; a compound is isolated from that plant; the compound is patented; the community that supplied the lead receives nothing and is not consulted. This has happened often enough that it has a name, and the pattern does not require any individual to behave badly, only for the chain from field note to patent to run without anyone in the middle asking who the knowledge belonged to.
The response has been procedural and it is now largely binding rather than optional. Prior informed consent, agreements on how any benefit is shared, community ownership of the resulting record, and the right of a community to withhold material it considers restricted are standard conditions of fieldwork and of publication. Journals ask for evidence of them.
None of this settles the underlying question of whether a body of knowledge held collectively and orally can be owned in a form a patent office recognises. It does mean the discipline can no longer treat that question as somebody else's.