NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #20/NN_1992_20.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/6333

Text File | 1992-09-07 | 9.4 KB | 178 lines

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From: [e-mail] (Harel Barzilai)
Subject: Chomsky (II) on GATT, Biodiversity, "Intellectual Properti" etc
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    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
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
    "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.
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

And on a positive note, Chomksy refers to some "countertendencies"
in recent history:

    "Had the quincentennial of the Old World Order been [not in 1992
    but in] 1962, it would have been celebrated once again as the
    liberation of the hemisphere.  Today, that is impossible, just as
    few can blandly talk of our task of "felling trees and Indians."

        =============================================
        [ . . . c o n t i n u a t i o n   o f . . . ]
        =============================================
The following article by Noam Chomsky appeared in:
     Z Magazine, July-August 1992
and is reprinted here with the magazine's permission.
=================================================================
Year 501: World Orders Old and New: Part II (PART 8 of 8; 13KB)
===============================================================
6. Reshaping Industrial Policy


[conclusion of section 6 of _Year 501..Part II_:]

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.

The tendencies towards the new imperial age heralded by the
international financial press are obvious and understandable,
along with the extension of the North-South divide to the
habitations of the rich.  There are also countertendencies.
Throughout the North, notably in the US, much has changed in the
past 30 years, at least in the cultural and moral spheres, if not
at the institutional level.  Had the quincentennial of the Old
World Order been in 1962, it would have been celebrated once
again as the liberation of the hemisphere.  Today, that is
impossible, just as few can blandly talk of our task of "felling
trees and Indians." The European invasion is now officially an
"encounter," though large sectors of the population rightly
reject that euphemism as only somewhat less offensive.  The
domestic constraints on state violence that are fully recognized
by the US political leadership are another case in point.  Many
were depressed by the inability of the peace movement to prevent
the Gulf war, failing to recall that perhaps for the first time
ever, large-scale protests actually preceded the bombing, a
radical change from the US assault against South Vietnam 30 years
ago.  The ferment of the 60's reached much wider circles in the
years that followed, eliciting new sensitivity to racist and
sexist oppression, concern for the environment, respect for other
cultures and for human rights.  One of the most striking examples
is the Third World solidarity movements of the 1980s, with their
unprecedented engagement in the lives and fate of the victims.
This process of democratization and concern for social justice
could have large significance.

Such developments are perceived to be dangerous and subversive by the
powerful, and bitterly denounced, often in tones of real hysteria.
That too is understandable: these countertendencies do threaten the
vile maxim of the masters [see earlier section of article were Chomsky
quotes this phrase from another source] --HB], and all that follows
from it.  They also offer the only real hope for the great mass of
people in the world, even for the survival of the human species in an
era of environmental and other global problems that cannot be faced by
primitive social and cultural structures that are driven by short term
material gain, and that regard human beings as mere instruments, not
ends.