Restoring the Balance

The rights of indigenous peoples to their medicinal and environmental knowledge are being ignored in new laws about copyright and patents. by Sue Williams

Intellectual property tights (IPRs) such as copyrights, patents, registered industrial rights and trademarks are justified as a protection of, and incentive to creativity.

Such rights are limited in time and space to prevent abuses, to prevent the growth of powerful monopolies for example, and protect the interests of the "public good". However, science and technology are taking us into an area where this balance between society and its inventors is increasingly blurred.

Where was the notion of "public good" for example in Monsanto's sterile seed technology known as "terminator"? More than 1.4 billion poor farmers in developing countries depend on farm-saved seed as their primary seed source. With "terminator" they would have had to buy new seeds every year. Similarly, where was the notion of "public good" when major pharmaceutical companies, in a bid to protect their patents, tried to block South African laws allowing local companies to manufacture cheaper, generic copies of AIDS drugs? AIDS is now the leading cause of death in Africa.

Happily, in both of these cases, public indignation and the sheer weight of the ethical issues involved won the day. Monsanto will not commercialise "terminator", and the pharmaceutical companies dropped their case against the South Africans. Nonetheless, constant public vigilance remains an absolute necessity. The world economy is today driven by knowledge, and the domain covered by intellectual property has grown exponentially. This growth has far reaching implications for the developing world - potentially affecting food production, health services and even cultural development.

There is no doubt that those who invest sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in a product have the right to protect that investment. But the public must not be held to ransom by this protection. The law must also protect those whose knowledge is exploited by the investors - such as indigenous cultures, whose environmental and medicinal knowledge and even cultural expressions are seen as something of a gold mine, but which have been completely bypassed by intellectual property laws.

Developing countries are increasingly aware of the high stakes involved and promise to make intellectual property one of the thorniest issues on the agenda of the Seattle Round of the World - Trade Organisation, which starts this month..

Taken from UNESCO Sources November 1999 - written just before Seattle WTO meeting.