Biotech, Third World-Style
Almost lost amid the clamor and clashes outside the recent World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle was the fact that developing nations like India and the Philippines made progress inside the hall. They succeeded in scuttling a Washington-led effort to extend international patent protections to cover not just inventions but also genes gathered from living organisms and bioengineered to make better drugs and agricultural crops.
American and European scientists have long sought and collected natural products from abroad for medical and other commercial uses. In the 1950s, for instance, Eli Lilly and Co. crafted the anticancer drug vincristine from chemicals found in the rosy periwinkle of Madagascar, and the U.S. Agriculture Department helped California farmers crossbreed their barley with an Ethiopian strain that conferred immunity against a threatening plant virus.
In the early 1990s, Western companies began accelerating efforts to secure U.S. and European patents on the plant and animal genes they gathered abroad. Biotechnology became big business and, by 1997, seven of the world’s 25 top-selling drugs, with a combined $11.6 billion in annual sales, were derived from natural products. Developing nations that lacked the technological prowess or marketing savvy to secure patents began to realize that foreign biotechnology posed a direct threat to their national self-interest and possible progress in the field.
Indian farmers, for example, have spent centuries crossbreeding basmati rice to develop its pleasing aromatic flavor. But in recent months U.S. companies have learned how to modify basmati rice genes to create high-yield strains that can be cheaply and easily grown on U.S. soil. Farmers in the developing world worry that foreign fabrications will cut into their export trade and, worse, one day force them to pay Western companies for the right to plant profitable versions of their own indigenous crops.
The Clinton administration needs to address these concerns soon. Major developing nations increasingly are closing the door to U.S. scientists seeking to collect biological samples within their borders.
The most sensible solution would be American ratification of an international treaty that most developing nations trust, the International Convention on Biodiversity. That treaty--signed by 175 nations in the early 1990s--outlines a protocol for international gene patents that leaders in the developed and developing world have called equitable. Congress, however, has refused to ratify the treaty because powerful senators including Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) believe it would compromise the ability of U.S. businesses to craft the best deals. The Clinton administration should find other ways of resolving the conflict, which is impeding scores of promising medical and agricultural research projects and souring commercial relations as well.
A middle-ground solution: Malaysia suggests helping the WTO set up a $3-billion international fund that developing nations could use to identify and protect their natural resources, a good idea.
