From: budaraju@cae.wisc.edu (Srinivas Budaraju)
Subject: Intellectual property rights
Organization: U of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering
Date: 4 Jan 93 12:49:39 CST
Summary: Only the knowledge of the rich and powerful merits protection

This is a slightly edited version of the article that appeared in
misc.activism.progressive. 		-Srinivas
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From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (Harel Barzilai)
Subject: Chomsky on GATT, Biodiversity, "Intellectual Properti" etc
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 02:52:25 GMT

The following article by Noam Chomsky appeared in: 

     Z Magazine, July-August 1992 

and is reprinted here with the magazine's permission. 
------------------------------------------------------------ 
At the same time, the cutting edge is shifting towards other 
areas, notably biotechnology.  Like other competitive sectors of 
the economy, the pharmaceutical and health industries and 
agribusiness have always benefited from a crucial state-organized 
subsidy for research, development, and marketing.  These areas 
are now gaining a greater role in planning for the years ahead. 
In the early postwar years, research would "spin off" electronics 
and computer firms, creating new opportunities for enrichment for 
engineers, scientists and entrepeneurs.  Today, biotech firms are 
springing up around the same research institutions, by rather 
similar mechanisms. 

The US National Institutes of Health are engaged in what the 
_Wall Street Journal_ calls "the biggest race for property 
since the great land rush of 1889," in this case, "staking U.S. 
patent claims to thousands of pieces of genetic material -- DNA 
-- that NIH scientists are certain are fragments of unknown 
genes." The purpose, the NIH explains, is to ensure that US 
corporations dominate the biotechnology business, which the 
government expects "to be generating annual revenue of $50 
billion by the year 2000," and vastly more beyond.  A recent 
patent for a basic human blood cell could allow a California 
company to "corner the market for a broad array of life-saving 
technologies," to cite merely one example.  The biotech business 
took off after a 1980 Supreme Court decision granting a patent 
for an oil-dissolving microorganism developed through genetic 
engineering, the _Journal_ observes. 

The prospects are considered to be expansive.  To convey a sense 
of the prospects, one researcher remarks that some way down the 
road, parents might even have to pay royalties for having 
children.  Medical procedures such as bone-marrow transplants and 
gene-based therapies will also be protected by patent.  The same 
could be true of engineered animals, seeds, and other organisms. 
We are now speaking of control of the essentials of life.  By 
comparison, electronics deals with mere 
conveniences. <<<NB: Michael Waldholz and Hilary Stout, "Rights 
to 
Life," _WSJ_, April 7, 1992.>>> 

These developments give new urgency to the US demand for 
increased protection for "intellectual property" -- crucially 
including patents -- at the ongoing GATT negotiations.  These 
protectionist measures are needed to ensure that US corporations 
dominate the health and agricultural industries, thus controlling 
the essentials for human life; and to guarantee to US 
pharmaceutical corporations huge profits on drugs that are priced 
far beyond the reach of taxpayers who fund the research, let 
alone the bulk of the world's population. "Basic biomedical 
research has long been heavily subsidized by United States 
taxpayers," the _New York Times_ business pages observe, and 
"high-tech pharmaceuticals owe their origin largely to these 
investments and to Government scientists," funded by billions of 
taxpayer dollars for the National Institutes of Health and for 
University research.  But drugs created through genetic 
engineering and other state subsidy are priced beyond the reach 
of those who pay for their development.  Protection of 
"intellectual property" is designed to guarantee monopoly profits 
to the publicly-subsidized corporations, not to benefit those who 
pay; and the South must be denied the right to produce drugs, 
seeds, and other necessities at a fraction of the cost. 

On similar grounds, the US has refused to sign a treaty on 
preserving the world's biological species.  The Assistant 
Secretary of State for the Environment, Curtis Bohlen, said that 
the treaty "fails to give adequate patent protection to American 
companies that transfer biotechnology to developing companies," 
and "tries to regulate genetically engineered materials, a 
competitive area in which the United States leads," the _New 
York Times_ reports. <<<NB: Fazlur Rahman, _NYT_, April 26; 
William Stevens, _NYT_, May 24, 1992.>>> 

The US International Trade Commission estimates that US companies
stand to gain $61 billion a year from the Third World if "intellectual
property" rights are protected in accord with US demands, a cost to
the South of somewhere between $100-300 billion when extrapolated to
the other industrial countries, dwarfing the debt service flow of
capital from South to North.  The same US demands will require poor
farmers to pay royalties to TNCs [Trans-National Corporations --HB]
for seeds, denying them the traditional right to re-use seeds from
their harvests.  Cloned varieties of commercial crops exported by the
South (palm oil, cotton, rubber, etc.) will also be commercial
property, subject to increased royalties. "The main beneficiaries will
be the core group of less than a dozen seeds and pharmaceuticals
companies which control over 70 per cent of world seeds trade," and
agribusiness generally, Kevin Watkins observes in a recent study for
the Catholic Institute of International Relations in London. <<<NB:
Watkins, _op. cit._, 93.>>>

While the US seeks to ensure monopoly control for the future, the 
same drug companies it protects are cheerfully exploiting the 
accumulated knowledge of indigenous cultures for products that 
bring in some $100 billion profits annually, offering virtually 
nothing in return to the native people who lead researchers to 
the medicines, seeds, and other products they have developed and 
refined over thousands of years. "The annual world market value 
for medicines derived from medicinal plants discovered from 
indigenous peoples is US $43 billion," ethnobotanist Darrell 
Posey estimates. "Less than 0.001% of the profits from drugs that 
originated from traditional medicine have ever gone to the 
indigenous people who led researchers to them." Profits of at 
least the same scale derive from natural insecticides, insect 
repellents, and plant genetic materials, he believes.  The 
international seed industry alone accounts for some $15 billion a 
year, based in large measure on genetic materials from crop 
varieties "selected, nurtured, improved and developed by 
innovative Third World farmers for hundreds, even thousands of 
years," Maria Elena Hurtado adds. <<<NB: Posey, "Intellectual 
Property Rights," _Anthropology Today_ (UK), Aug. 1990.>>> 

Only the knowledge of the rich and powerful merits protection. 

Before gaining its current dominance, the US did not abide by the 
rules it now seeks to impose.  In the 19th century, the US 
rejected foreign claims to intellectual property rights on 
grounds that they would hamper its economic development.  Japan 
followed the same course. <<<NB: Watkins, _op. cit._, 95.>>>  And 
today, the concept of "intellectual property rights" is finely 
crafted to suit the needs of the powerful.  Exactly as in the 
case of "free trade," the subjects in the new imperial age are to 
be denied any recourse to the methods that were used by the "rich 
men dwelling at peace within their habitations." 

This combination of plans by the rulers of the new imperial age 
is viewed from the South as "an act of unbridled piracy," Watkins 
observes, given the fact that the genetic materials used by the 
Western corporations to create their patented and protected 
products are derived from Third World crops and wild plants, 
cultivated, refined, and identified over countless generations. 
The seed and pharmaceutical companies thus "reap monopoly 
profits, while the genius of the Third World farmers, past and 
present, in selecting and developing individual seed strains goes 
unrewarded." The New World Order as a whole is described by 
Egypt's leading newspaper, _al-Ahram_, as "codified 
international piracy," referring in this case to the efforts of 
the Bush Administration to set up a confrontation with Qaddafi 
for domestic political purposes in the manner that has become 
routine since Libya's utility as a cheap punching bag was 
recognized by Reaganite PR specialists in 1981.  The terminology 
is apt enough. <<<NB: David Hirst, London _Guardian_, March 23, 
1992. "Let President Bush find some other issue for his election 
campaign," one columnist wrote.>>> 

The unbridled piracy takes on increased urgency as indigenous 
agriculture and knowledge are undermined in favor of ecologically 
unsustainable agroexport in the interests of the TNCs, and the 
biological resources of the South -- the world's richest by far 
-- are sharply reduced, raising the danger of disease and blight 
to potentially catastrophic levels.  To whatever extent 
biotechnology may provide a remedy, the effect again will be to 
transfer power and wealth to the rulers of the new imperial age, 
if the demands of the corporations for increased protection are 
implemented.  That they will be is almost a foregone conclusion, 
given the distribution of power and the insulation of 
decision-making from public interference in the new imperial age.