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<P><FONT face="minion, georgia"><FONT color=#003a00 size=+2><B>Updated: Pirates
of the Caribbean</B></FONT></FONT>
<P><FONT face="arial, helvetica"><FONT size=-1>By Stan Cox<BR>Prairie Writers
Circle
<P>(Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2003 -- CropChoice guest commentary) -- Members of the
World Trade Organization worry that their Sept. 10-14 meeting in Cancun, Mexico,
might turn into a rerun of the tumultuous Seattle gathering in 1999.
<P>To defuse one of several high-profile controversies, the United States has
agreed, after much haggling, to relax pharmaceutical patents so poor countries
can produce or import inexpensive generic drugs during public health
emergencies.
<P>South Africa's representative to the WTO claimed the compromise agreement
would save millions of lives. But some other nations and independent aid groups
said the new rules on packaging, licensing and export of generic drugs would
make them too expensive for most poor patients.
<P>" Today's deal was designed to offer comfort to the U.S. and the Western
pharmaceutical industry," said a representative of the relief agency Doctors
Without Borders. " Global patent rules will continue to drive up the price of
medicines."
<P>Earlier this year, Congress connected patented drugs with patented corn and
soybeans by passing President Bush’s Global AIDS Initiative. Somewhat jarringly,
the new program links medical assistance for AIDS-stricken countries to their
acceptance of food aid produced from genetically engineered crops.
<P>Seed and pharmaceutical companies, which are intertwined in what they like to
call the "life sciences" industry, sell many products that can be reproduced
cheaply and on a huge scale. They share this problem with the software and
entertainment businesses. Without governments and international bodies like the
WTO to back up their patents, all of these industries could say goodbye to their
hefty profits.
<P>The stormier the world economy, the more big business insists on claiming
information -- both humanity’s and nature’s -- as its own property. The fewer
tangible goods that corporations are able to sell abroad, the more they depend
on the sale of ideas, words, symbols, knowledge and brands. And once price tags
are attached to these intangibles, sharing them is redefined as piracy.
<P>Every year, we Americans import and consume more of the kinds of goods you
can actually lay your hands on, like clothes and appliances -- and, of course,
oil. Our annual balance-of-trade deficit has swollen alarmingly in the past
decade to around $400 billion -- the equivalent of importing the entire economy
of India every twelve months.
<P>That deficit would be a lot bigger without the continued broadening of
intellectual property rights. In the words of Michael Perelman of California
State University, Chico, "Intellectual property rights have become the financial
counterweight to deindustrialization (in the United States), because the
revenues they generate help to balance the massive imports of material goods."
<P>When cracking down on pirated DVDs and shoes marked with a stolen "swoosh"
becomes a cornerstone of our global economic strategy, we're in trouble. And
it’s downright embarrassing when the world’s only superpower tries to pay for
its bloated consumption by extracting seed and medicine royalties from some of
the world’s hungriest and sickest people.
<P>The uninhibited flow of information is a long human tradition It has been
crucial to seed, drug and computer companies, among others. They didn’t pull
their ideas and data out of thin air. The information they call private property
has its roots in taxpayer-funded research. University and government
researchers, in turn, draw on centuries of ideas hatched by others. The
information that nature encoded in patented genes is far more ancient.
<P>The Constitution views patents as a way to spur creativity, not block access
to the basics of life. And that distinction is becoming more crucial. The
Earth’s inhabitants will face serious scarcities in the decades to come. Because
of these limits on matter and energy, we must let information follow its natural
tendency to move and multiply freely. To keep the planet livable, we’ll need to
draw on the entire pool of human knowledge, as well as the plant, animal and
microbial gene pools that, until recently, were our common inheritance.
<P>People risk being hunted down as pirates when they share music files, save
seed from patented crops or bring back a suitcase full of medicines from Mexico.
But, whatever their legal status, these are strictly small-time activities.
You'll find the big-time pirates operating openly starting Sept. 10 along the
coast at Cancun.
<P>###
<P>Stan Cox is a member of the Prairie Writers Circle and senior research
scientist at the Land Institute in Salina, Kan. From 1984 to 1996, he was a
plant geneticist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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