The following is a series of questions addressed to professor Noam
Chomsky following a lecture he delivered at the University of Illinois at
Chicago on October 17, 1994.
[snip]
Could you comment on the current policies of GATT, the whole notion of
intellectual property rights, and the effect of these policies on food
production in the Third World?
That's a really important topic and in fact it was one I had hoped to talk
about but didn't have time for. GATT is called a free trade agreement,
just as NAFTA was, but that's nonsense. These things are not about free
trade and they're certainly not agreements. In fact most of the people in
the world are opposed to them. What you mentioned is an extreme case of
that. Intellectual property rights have to do with protectionism. The U.S., and
in fact the rich countries generally, have led the insistence that the GATT
agreement, like NAFTA, include strong intellectual property rights.
That's protectionism. That means increasing the power of patents. Patents
are protectionist devices. They are designed to insure that the
technology of the future is in the hands of transnational corporations,
most of which, incidentally, you guys pay for. Remember they don't
believe in a free market. They want to be publicly subsidized in research
and development and controlled markets and so on. The strength of
intellectual property rights means longer patents.
Take India for instance. India has a big pharmaceutical industry. They
can produce drugs at a fraction of the cost of what Merck wants to sell
them for. In fact drug prices are way lower in India than in Pakistan
next door because India happened to develop its own pharmaceutical
industry. The American corporations don't like that. They want more
children to die in India. It's not whether they care whether children die.
They want more profit, which means more children die in India. They
want to make sure India doesn't produce drugs at less than the cost of
American drugs. Now this is done in two ways under GATT. One way is to
increase the length of patents. The other is to change their character
from process patents to product patents. That's very crucial. In the past
patents were process patents. Like if Merck, thanks to your taxes,
designed a way to produce a certain drug, and then say some smart guy
in India figured out a cheaper way to produce that drug, that was
allowed. We don't want that. We want to cut down technological
innovation, cut back economic process, economic progress, and economic
efficiency and increase profit. So now they are product patents. If Merck
figures out a certain way to produce a drug they can hold that for
twenty years because it's a product, and they can hold the process for
another twenty years. They get forty years of holding on to that drug.
By that time everybody's forgotten about it. There's some history about
this. The developed countries like us never accepted anything like that.
Even weak patents on technological development weren't accepted by the
rich countries until just a few years ago. There was one time that I
know of that product patents were actually tried, namely in France in
the early part of the century that had such patents. That destroyed the
French chemical industry. It moved to Switzerland. So Switzerland has a
big chemical industry and not France. It's not a big secret. This is
straight history and the people who are planning GATT understand it.
They want to make sure that they destroy the Indian or Argentinean
pharmaceutical industries the same way that France's dumb choices
destroyed the French chemical industry. The New York Times a couple of
weeks ago had a tiny ten line item stating that India (with a gun pointed
at its head) agreed finally to liberalize their pharmaceutical industry,
meaning sell it to western corporations. So drug prices will shoot sky
high in India and children will die but there will be more profits. Now
this has nothing to do with free trade. This is a high level of
protectionism. In fact it is specifically designed even to be contrary to
the narrow definitions of efficiency that they teach at the University of
Chicago Economics Department. So it's going to cut down on technological
innovations, efficiency and so on, but it will happen to increase profits
by accident. Well, that's intellectual property rights. I gave one example
but there are plenty of others like it. If you look over the whole GATT
Agreement this is sort of a complicated array of protectionist and
liberalizing devices very carefully geared to the interests of
transnationals.
As far as agriculture is concerned, the way of measuring the efficiency
of agricultural production, which like most of these measures are just
tax-based ideology that don't have anything to do with science, is to look
at certain inputs and outputs and you do some calculations to figure out
what the efficiency is. Some things are left out. If you do the
calculations their way the cost of environmental pollution doesn't count.
That's called an externality, which means they worry about it in some
other department. There's another one you don't count.
It usually turns out to be the case that heavily subsidized western agri-
business tend to produce corn more efficiently than, say, Mexican
peasants. If you do a narrow measure of the highly ideological type that
they teach you about in economics departments it will turn out to be
more efficient for the world if American agri-business produces corn with
big petroleum inputs than if Mexican peasants do it, but there's a few
things left out of that calculation. One thing that's left out is that ten to
fifteen million Mexican peasants will be driven off the land. They're going
to be driven into cities where they're going to starve. There's a lot of
costs associated with that. Put aside the human cost which nobody cares
about. Just take the straight economic costs like taking care of them
somehow. Well, that's somebody else's department. We don't count that one
in.
Put all this stuff together and you get particular choices. This is a game
of class warfare masked in big words so it sounds like science and
mathematical formulas. If you ask common sense questions you see all
kinds of things are left out. If you're sending corn to Mexico you've got
to put it in trucks. What about transit costs? The purpose of these
agreements is to ensure that agricultural production is monopolized by
transnationals and that the third world gets nothing. If you read the
Indian press you may have noticed that Indian customs officials stopped
some alleged German scientists at the border who were leaving India with
some funny stuff in their bags, namely a couple hundred thousand bugs.
They didn't know what the hell they're doing with these things but we
know. That's the gene pool that western pharmaceutical companies are
trying to steal from the south. Those are their resources but we get
them for free. For thousands of years people in the south have been
developing crops. They don't own them. They don't get any rights from
that. We just go in and steal them. So they have the rich gene pool and
the thousands of years of experience in creating hybrids and figuring
out what herb works. Then western corporations go in and take it for
nothing, just check if they've got a piece of paper anywhere that says
they own it, stamped by the authorities. Therefore we steal it from them
and it appears in some biology lab. We minimally modify it and sell it to
them. We patent it. It's a scam designed to rob the poor and enrich the
rich, like most social policy. That shouldn't surprise you. After all, who
made social policy? This was a truism of Adam Smith. The people who
make social policy make it in their interest. They wouldn't be in a
position to make social policy if they weren't rich and privileged. People
suffer.
Sara Wood, Essential Information
e-mail: swood@essential.org