Newspaper of the Socialist Party of Australia
2000
The Uruguay round of GATT included an agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). Governments who sign up with the WTO are obliged to legislate patenting, licencing and other laws for the strict protection of "intellectual property rights" -- that is, the private ownership of knowledge, of such things as technology, new inventions, plant varieties, genes, microbioligical processes, pharmaceuticals, chemicals.
The OECD speaks in terms of the "The Knowledge-driven Economy" and says that "the high-technology share of OECD manufacturing production and exports has more than doubled, to reach 20-25 per cent. Knowledge-intensive service sectors, such as education, communications and information, are growing even faster. It is estimated that more than 50 per cent of GDP in the major OECD economies is now knowledge-based."1
"Some four-fifths of global civilian research and development is undertaken within TNC systems", according to the World Investment Report.2
TRIPS is designed to protect the technological and knowledge advantages of the major TNCs of the industrialised countries have in this area.
Scientist and activist, Vandana Shiva, writing in Third World Resurgence 3, reports that the TRIPs agreement was imposed by transnational corporations.
"The framework for the TRIPs agreement was conceived and shaped by the Intellectual Property Committee (IPC) of the US, Keidanren (Japan) and UNICE (Europe). The IPC is a coalition of 13 major US corporations dedicated to the finalisation of TRIPS in GATT. The members of IPC are Bristol Myers, Dupont, General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Johnson and Johnson, Merck Monsanto, Pfizer, Rockwell and Warner. Keidanren is the Japanese Federation of Economic Organisations. UNICE is recognised as an official representative of the European business and industry."
Vandana Shiva quotes James Enyart of Monsanto boasting of the IPC's achievements:
"... our 'Trilateral Group' was able to distill from the laws of the more advanced countries the fundamental principles for protecting all forms of intellectual property...
"Industry has identified a major problem in international trade. It crafted a solution, reduced it to a concrete proposal and sold it to our own and other governments... The industries and traders of world commerce have played simultaneously the role of patients, the diagnosticians and the prescribing physicians."
As Vanadana Shiva points out, the process usurps the rights of diverse social groups and "has led to the displacement of ethical, ecological and social concern from the substance of the TRIPs agreement... it is the imposition of values and interests on the diverse societies and cultures of the world."
The TRIPs agreement covers the building blocks to make genes, monoclonal antibodies, hybridonas, enzymes, chemicals, microorganisms and plants.
Commodification of life
Life is treated as a commodity to be privately owned and bought and sold on markets for purely commercial reasons -- the commercial (i.e. profit-making) overriding all other factors -- health, ecological, ethical, cultural and even life itself.
The members of the Intellectual Property Committee are predominantly involved in pharmaceuticals, chemicals including agrichemicals and biotechnology.
The Rural Advancement Fund International (RAFI) in its September/October 1995 Communique lists 57 of the many companies (the majority from the US) that are appropriating the genetic resources and indigenous knowledge of developing countries for patenting and private profit.
The private ownership of life has reached the point in the US where the genetic material of a man of the Hagahai people of the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea has been patented by a government body -- the National Institute of Health.
"This patent is another major step down the road to the commodification of life. In the days of colonialism, researchers went after indigenous peoples' resources and studied their social organisations and customs. But now, in biocolonial times, they are going after the people themselves", said Pat Roy Mooney, executive director of RAFI.
Neither the TRIPs nor US legislation provides for any compensation for the people whose genetic and other materials are being pirated and patented. Their "intellectual property rights" are not protected.
"The Hagahai, and millions of other indigenous people, in other words, are raw material for US business", writes RAFI.
In the rural sector, the "green revolution" opened the door to TNCs with the extensive use of patented seeds and fertilisers.
The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) continue the process. Farmers and indigenous people are being dispossessed of their land which is being used for luxury export crops instead of staple foods. Small scale sustainable peasant agriculture has been replaced by big agribusinesses and no longer feeds local populations.
Water is no longer a right, no longer distributed on a democratic or needs basis. The market determines the distribution and price of water.
Likewise the patenting and monopolisation of seeds are undermining farmers' rights.
Farmers facing higher prices for water, seeds and fertilisers from TNCs find that the costs of production outpace the prices they receive for agricultural products.
More and more basic foods are being imported following trade liberalisation and the concentration on export crops. Devaluation of local currencies, removal of food subsidies and frozen wages (another condition of the SAPs) saw food prices "internationalised" to well beyond the reach of many people.
In Mozambique food prices rose by 400-600 per cent as a consequence of these policies.
Export-oriented programs resulted in food shortages in some countries. Malnutrition increased. The health of the people deteriorated.
Diseases in African countries that had not been seen for years returned. Infant mortality rates (an indicator of social development) which had fallen since decolonisation in a number of poor countries, rose (by as much as 53.5 per cent in Madagascar).
The number of poorer people using health services declined following the introduction of user charges ("cost recovery") and privatisation of public services.
"Nearly one third of the Nicaraguan children under five years of age are undernourished. Four out of 10 children are living in the rural areas in conditions of extreme poverty and suffer from severe malnutrition", writes Maria Zuniga, Director of the Centre for Information and Advisory Services in Health, in Managua.4
"In Nicaragua, as in other poor countries of the Third World, the sacred right of people to life and health is being eliminated on a daily basis, as if the objective were to eliminate the poor and hungry population who are considered expendable by the authors of the health policies of the Bretton Woods [World Bank and IMF] institutions."
There was also strong criticism of these policies at the UNCTAD- IX conference held in South Africa in May, 1996, which brought together 3,000 representatives from 188 countries to examine the implications of globalisation.
"The current system of globalisation and liberalisation has had devastating effects upon African economies. Our countries have been pushed backwards into increasing debt, deindustrialisation, agricultural decline, environmental degradation, poverty and deepening inequality", said an African NGO Declaration for the conference.
"We oppose a system which places growth above all other goals, including human well-being and which undermines national economic development and social security. This global system has resulted in an ever greater concentration of power and control over resources into the hands of a relatively few transnational corporations and financial institutions", the declaration said.
"It is the poor countries that are usually left behind because the free trade regime that is supervised by the WTO (World Trade Organisation) is a system that rewards those who are already strong and punishes those that are weak", said Martin Khor, director of Third World Network which links development non- government organisations (NGOs) in 95 countries.
"They talk of a level playing field, which means that everybody is to follow the same rules, but when the original situation between two parties is unequal and you apply the same rules to them, what you have is the intensification of the inequalities", said Mr Khor.
"The neo-liberal economic paradigm makes our governments unresponsive to our basic economic and social needs, forces open our economies to the advantage of external traders and investors, and makes African countries ever more dependent upon the richer industrialised countries and their transnational corporations", said Rudo Mungwashu, vice-president of the International Youth and Student Movement of the United Nations.
1 The OECD Observer June/July 1996
2 World Investment Report 1995: Transnational Corporations and Competitiveness, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Division on Transnational Corporations and Investment)
3 Third World Resurgence, Third World Network, Malaysia, No. 63, November 1995, pp. 16-17.
4 Third world Resurgence, No 68, April 1996, p.25. Next Week: "Asia through the eyes of a parasite"
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