In Latin the word scientia means “knowledge––and our word “science” means, at base, “systems of knowledge” and “ways we come to know things.”
Who owns knowledge? Who owns science? At first glance, the questions seem ridiculous: How can anyone own the store of facts about the world and ways of doing things that people, individually and collectively, keep in their heads? It turns out that what we really mean when we ask this question is “who will have the right to control the circulation of knowledge?” and, even more importantly, “who will have the right to benefit from it?”
Answering this question takes us into the seemingly arcane realm of copyright and patent law and what has come to be called “intellectual property.” But, as the contributors to this issue of the NACLA Report show, questions of “intellectual property” have very real effects. The survival of individuals as well as that of whole cultures and, indeed, that of the natural world as we know it, is at stake in how the question “who owns knowledge?” is answered: Brazil, for instance, has made anti-AIDS drugs available free to anyone who needs them, a policy that has significantly slowed the spread of the disease and prolonged the lives of many who would have died without these medicines. As Carlos Passarelli and Veriano Terto Jr. report, carrying out this policy has brought the Brazilian government into confrontation with the multinational pharmaceutical companies that hold patents on the drugs—and with the U.S. government, which insists that Brazil conform with the intellectual property provisions of U.S.-promoted international trade treaties. But patents don’t merely restrict access to new drugs and other products by raising the prices of patented products higher than poor people, and poor nations, can afford—they also make the technology needed to make the products inaccessible and thus have slowed the growth of the biotechnology industry in Latin America.
Increasingly, however, patented biotech products are ones that Latin Americans (and others) would like to avoid—but can’t. Latin American farmers, like farmers around the world, are being pressured to adopt genetically modified (GM) seeds produced and sold by multinational companies. Promoters of these products claim that they will make it possible to feed the world’s growing population. But agricultural expert Miguel Altieri argues that the real brake on food production in Latin America is unequal distribution of land, and that traditional crop varieties, and traditional ways of growing them, still offer the best chance for feeding the region while at the same time preserving the region’s natural resources. Altieri warns as well of the permanent damage that genetically modified crops could wreak on the region’s biological diversity via contamination of the genetic stock of indigenous plant species. Such contamination has already occurred in Mexico, where genes from GM corn have been found in native varieties.
Knowledge does not always flow from the laboratories of the developed world to the people of the developing world. Often the flow goes in the other direction: “Modern” science has long looked to “primitive” peoples as a source of information about resources, especially botanical resources, that could be turned into new foods and medicines. What has long been overlooked, however, is that many cultures have systematized their knowledge of local plants and other resources in ways that should rightly be called scientific; if the knowledge developed by “Western” scientists is worthy of legal protection and compensation, so should be this indigenous knowledge. But until 1992, when the Convention on Biological Diversity, approved at a UN conference in Rio de Janeiro, recognized the principle that the knowledge accumulated and developed by indigenous peoples is a form of intellectual property, this knowledge was generally regarded as the “common property of humanity.” Many questions about how this principle should be put into practice remain unanswered, and what outsiders view as legitimate “bioprospecting” may still be seen by local people as a form of “biopiracy.” Barbara Belejack chronicles how one such conflict led to the demise of a multimillion dollar botanical medicine research project in Chiapas, Mexico.
Many of our contributors rightly stress how recent disputes over intellectual property in Latin America are tied to globalization and to U.S.-led promotion of neoliberal precepts and free trade agreements that would expand corporate power in the region. Such conflicts make it clear that it’s not possible to discuss the subject of science and technology in Latin America without placing it in the larger framework of Latin America’s role in the world economy.
This is nothing new: The concept of “intellectual property”—the idea that a creator of a work or originator of a technique should be recognized as the “owner” of that work or technology and should be able to control how it is reproduced and used—is as old as capitalism itself. The notion dates back to the fifteenth century, when the first embryonic copyright and patent laws went into effect in some parts of Europe. The U.S. Constitution—written in the 1780s, a product of the first era of liberal ascendance—gives Congress the power to make copyright and patent laws in order “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” Globalization has merely highlighted the fact that, under capitalism, an economic value can be placed on knowledge: It can be bought and sold like a bolt of cloth, a machine, a piece of land, an oil well or an ore deposit.
But it is only recently that knowledge about biological resources—as opposed to the resources in themselves—has been seen as “ownable.” The first U.S. patent laws specifically excluded living things. In the 1930s, the laws were revised to make it possible to patent newly developed seed varieties, a change that primarily benefitted plant breeders. The advent of recombinant DNA technologies—”gene-splicing”—in the 1970s and the more recent push to “map” the genes of living things, including humans, set the stage for the explosive growth of the “biotech” industry and for the current conflicts over ownership of biological knowledge.
All the same, since the Conquest, trade in biological resources and knowledge has formed a central theme in the story of Latin America’s relations with the rest of the world. Many chroniclers of this tale have borrowed Alfred Crosby’s phrase “Columbian Exchange” to describe the massive transoceanic genetic swap that began when indigenous American plants like corn and potatoes were exported to Europe, and native European plants like wheat, and animals such as horses were transplanted to the Americas. The word “exchange,” though, seems to imply that the trade was a voluntary one, with benefits for both sides. Crosby himself has stressed the “imperialist” nature of the transfer, the ecological damage caused as European humans exploited American humans, plants and animals to the point of extinction and “stronger” European plant and animal species took over the ecological spaces formerly occupied by American species. “The Columbian exchange has left us with not a richer but a more impoverished genetic pool,” he wrote in 1972.[1]
At the same time—as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Marcos Cueto tell us in their historical overview in this issue—the European colonizers turned to indigenous Americans as a source of information about local plants and animals from the very beginning. The wave of European scientists seeking to classify, collect—and make commercial use of—the biological resources of the Americas reached a peak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as explorers like Alexander von Humboldt tramped through the more remote parts of the continent. While we can guess that the explorers’ Indian guides and “informants” were not always as forthcoming as the outsiders might have liked, Europe’s quest to exploit New World plants provoked few open conflicts until the nineteenth century, when the newly independent nations of Latin America began seeking to commercialize their own “vegetable patrimony.” Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia passed laws and took other steps aimed at preventing the export of valuable native seeds and plants. That didn’t stop the Europeans from spiriting off enough rubber and cinchona plants—source of the anti-malaria drug quinine—to start Asian plantations. Britain’s Kew Gardens played an important role in facilitating what would today be labeled acts of “biopiracy.”
By the mid-twentieth century, however, scientific interest in plants as a source of valuable products like rubber, drugs, pesticides and the like had almost entirely disappeared. Scientists had developed synthetic substitutes for most products formerly derived from plants, and they believed they would be able to create an infinite stream of new products merely by combining molecules in the lab.
But the new age of genetic engineering and biotech has also been an era of renewed interest in plants as potential drug sources. This is not as paradoxical as it might seem: Scientists discovered, contrary to their expectations, that it is often easier to make drugs by starting with plant extracts rather than by synthesizing molecules from scratch; the new technologies have made it possible to screen many more plants for such uses. But there are many more plants in the world than can be tested by even the most efficient technology. Local experts are still the best source of knowledge about which plants should be screened: According to a World Bank report, “It has been estimated that by consulting indigenous peoples, bioprospectors can increase the success ratio in trials [of plants being tested for possible medical use] from one in 10,000 samples to one in two.”[2]
At the same time, over the last decade there has been increased international concern about preserving “biodiversity” in the fragile areas where both indigenous plants and indigenous peoples are often found. And indigenous peoples themselves have begun to organize internationally to protect their knowledge and their resources. But while the 1992 Convention on Biodiversity has provided the foundation for a legal framework for compensating indigenous peoples for their “intellectual property,”some are not interested in commodifying knowledge that has traditionally been regarded as a social good. In any case, determining what knowledge “belongs” to a particular people or peoples and which groups or subgroups should get what share in compensation remains a knotty problem.
Another thorny question involves the fate of three Latin American repositories where genetic material from thousands of varieties of indigenous food plants has been collected and stored.[3] These “gene banks”—for corn in Mexico, potatoes in Peru, and cassava and beans in Colombia—were created to preserve the genetic diversity found in “centers of origin,” the regions where botanists believe the crops were first domesticated from wild varieties. The material held in the banks has no legal “owner”—it is made freely available to any researcher who is willing to certify that any new products which result will not be patented. But Miguel Altieri reports that the banks are coming under increasing pressure to patent and commercialize their holdings so that they can pay the bills in an era of shrinking support for such public institutions.
Meanwhile, different Latin American nations have taken widely differing stances toward the adoption of genetically modified food crops. Argentina has become the world’s second largest producer—after the United States—of GM crops. Argentina is a major soy exporter; not surprisingly, the main GM crop grown in that nation is soybeans. But Brazil is also an important soy exporter and Brazil, in contrast to its neighbor, has placed a virtual ban on cultivation of GM crops until they are proven safe. The corporate owners of GM seed patents are, of course, lobbying hard to overturn the Brazilian restrictions, even as groups like Greenpeace continue to campaign in favor of continuing them.
In these ways and others the conflicts first touched off by the “Columbian Exchange” continue into the present—they show that far from being a subject removed from conflicts over political and economic power, science brings us right into the thick of these struggles, and our answer to the question “who will we allow to own knowledge?” will shape the future of the Americas, and the rest of the world.
NOTES:
1. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange (Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, 1972). Excerpted in NACLA Report, XXV, No. 2, September, 1991. This special Quincentennial issue includes other articles on “The Conquest of Nature, 1492-1992.”
2. World Bank, IK [Indigenous Knowledge] Notes No. 19, April, 2000. World Bank webpage on IK at http://www.worldbank.org/aftdr/ik/ default.htm
3. These centers, and others around the world, are part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and operate under the auspices of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
http://www.cgiar.org/
