WTO, “Trips,” patents in the developing world
I’ve just read an article by Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist Vandana Shiva that set me to thinking a bit more about the dangers that excessive concern with protecting “intellectual property” in the rich world poses to the developing world and to societies’ capacity for self-determination more generally. The article appears in Global Capitalism, a volume of essays edited by famed British sociologist Anthony Giddens and author Will Hutton. Essentially, Shiva’s article suggests how international intellectual property laws are being expanded and exploited in order to consolidate control over the full range of human economic activity in the hands of a few large corporations. She zeros in, however, on how this is happening in agriculture. Clearly, if the world’s food supply is at stake, this is an issue of considerably greater importance than free software, but some the issues are the same.
Shiva’s rhetoric tends toward incendiary anti-capitalist boilerplate, and her arguments lose some of their force when she introduces unhelpful, screwball epithets like “species-centric” to castigate her enemies. But the force of her logic can’t be denied when she addresses the “Trips” (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) component of the 1994 World Trade Organization agreement that sought to apply rich-world intellectual property customs and laws across the board, forcing them on the developing world:
The poorer two thirds of humanity sustains itself through livelihoods based on biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. Today, this resource base of the poor is under threat as their plans and seeds are patented and claimed as inventions of Western scientists and Western corporations…. The TRIPs agreement … is not the result of democratic negotiations between the larger public and commercial interests or between industrialised countries and the Third World. It is the imposition of values and interests by Western transnational corporations on the diverse societies and cultures of the world.
Certainly talented minds in the developing world have come up with innovations that might provide lucrative patent material in the rich world. If it never occurred to them to try to protect their intellectual property because their profit instinct happens to be somewhat duller than ours, their ideas could easily end up being pirated by the rich world. Perhaps this happens as frequently in the world of scientific investigation and information technology as in the traditional realm of “indigenous knowledge” to which Shiva refers.
Shiva offers a chilling example of corporate overreaching to protect its intellectual property when she describes Monsanto’s practice of prohibiting farmers from saving seed, so that they have to buy every year from Monsanto. I’m unclear on exactly, how, but apparently patent law is employed to make this possible. It’s worth following up on with a bit more research.
Reading Shiva recalled a story I found in the Oct. 14, 2002 edition of the New York Times which deals with a report issued by the international Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, which recommends the loosening of the Trips restrictions:
The United States does stand to gain the most from stronger intellectual property protections, most of which must be in effect by 2005, under Trips. A World Bank study estimates that American companies would pocket an additional $19 billion a year in royalties, while developing nations like China, Mexico, Brazil and India — net importers of intellectual property — would pay more to the patent holders.
A plan that attempts to divert yet more money from already cash-strapped nations into the coffers of rich-world corporations obviously needs to be reconsidered. This NYT article is also useful for its clear summaries of the issues at stake:
Intellectual property rights are temporary grants of monopoly intended to give economic incentives for innovative activity. Why toil for months or years to develop a new drug or think up a clever software program, the thinking goes, unless there is the potential for a big payoff? The intended result is that consumers will pay somewhat higher prices for an individual drug or software program but will benefit from all the additional innovation in the economy.That is the theory. Within the United States, there is criticism that the corporate frenzy to patent any technical advance, even business methods, undermines innovation by unnecessarily restricting the flow of ideas.
I also like the Times author’s pragmatic citation of economist Jeffrey Sachs:
The concern about Trips is that it is too much of a one-size-fits-all approach that works to the detriment of developing nations. “It would be fine if we lived in a world of all rich people,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a development economist at Columbia University. “The danger with Trips is that it will mostly hurt the developing countries’ access to ideas.”
and his equally pragmatic conclusion, even if I’m not in full agreement about the absolute worth of intellectual property rights:
In the end, the debate over intellectual property rights, like the controversy over I.M.F. policies in developing nations, may be more a dispute about speed than direction. Free trade, open financial markets and intellectual property rights are economic goals worth pursuing. But that is not to say that the preferred path is necessarily the straight line of ideological purity.