UNCED: TECHNOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, DEVELOPMENT AND THIRD WORLD.

Mar 21, 1991

UNCED: TECHNOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, DEVELOPMENT AND THIRD WORLD.

GENEVA, MARCH 19 (CHAKRAVARTHI RAGHAVAN) – A number of questions of North-South relations in the area of technology are shaping up as issues for "Agenda 21" of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development as well as figuring on other international instruments being separately negotiated for adoption at that meeting.

The Second session of the UNCED Preparatory Committee is having a first bite of sorts on these questions on the basis of several analytical reports prepared by the secretariat to enable the PREPCOM to formulate programmes of action for "Agenda 21".

Some technology questions figure as sectoral issues and relate to the question of international convention for "conservation of biodiversity" and issues of "environmentally sound management of biotechnology", both being considered in a working group.

Others figure as cross-sectoral issues.

The plenary of the PREPCOM is due to take up as a cross-sectoral issue the question of "transfer of technology".

Several of the issues are old items on the international agenda on which considerable amount of work had been done within the UN system. But these have been pushed aside by the U.S. and other leading Industrial Nations, in the pursuit of their neo-mercantilist strategies to secure freedom for their transnational corporations to operate in the Third World.

These efforts are centered in the GATT and the Uruguay Round where - through rules and disciplines in intellectual property rights, investment and services (of which technology is one) - the ICs have been trying, in the words of former UNCTAD Technology Division head, Surendra Patel, to ensure that "the clock is not only put back but is to be re-made to move only backward".

The UNCED Secretariat has pointed out that "environmentally sound technology" is a "case-specific, area-specific matter" and depends on "technical and economic realities" and that they are just individual technologies but total systems.

Though this would imply that the wider issues would need to be tackled, in its cross-sectoral analytical paper, the secretariat has sought to chart a course to avoid conflict with the U.S. position by saying that "the broader issues of intellectual property rights are under discussion in other fora such as WIPO and in the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations", implying presumably that these could be kept out of UNCED and the PREPCOM.

The PREPCOM, it suggests, might discuss some issues of "environmentally sound technologies" and lists them as:

* Patentability issues regarding environment, specifically those for living organisms,

* Applicability of public interest provisions existing in some patent legislations and the need to define explicitly the scope and coverage of an environmental public interest, and

* The suggestion that obligations under conventions to use patent-protected technologies may be ineffective, unless developing countries are exempted from implementation until the patent expires or other financial means are established to cover the implementation burden on developing countries.

However, several Third World delegates and some NGOs say that it would be difficult to avoid some of the basic issues, particularly if the Uruguay Round negotiations and agreements are not to foreclose international options.

In the WIPO, they note, the attempts of the 70’s to promote technology transfer through changes in the Paris Conventions have been thwarted by the ICs, who are now trying to reverse the process in order to secure international monopoly rights and rentier incomes for their TNCs through the Uruguay Round and under the guise of harmonisation.

But even apart from the wider issues, specific issues relating to living organisms and public interest and public policy issues, which the PREPCOM has been asked to consider, could be irreversibly settled in the Uruguay Round before "Agenda 21" can be set.

The patentability of living organisms, microorganisms and biotechnology issues are on the Uruguay Round Trips agenda and the U.S. is pushing for the widest coverage.

In some of the international conventions under discussion, such as that on biological diversity, the issue of "living organisms" is being sought to be narrowly defined so as to exclude, for example, implanted genes - taken from one organism and implanted in a plant or animal to secure particular characteristics.

These are sought to be enshrined for international patenting rights so that under the process/product theories any plant or animal with those gene characteristics would be covered, with some far-reaching implications for environment protection and sustainable development of the Third World.

This has also been very much in the minds of several of the Non-Governmental Organisations who have insisted on an "environment and social impact" assessment of the Uruguay Round agreements before they are allowed to be concluded and ratified and enforced.

That the GATT Uruguay Round discussions and negotiations on intellectual property should not be concluded without thorough examination "inter alia of the environmental and socio-economic aspects related to biotechnology, indigenous knowledge and traditional innovation has been thoroughly examined" has been suggested at the UNEP ad hoc working group of experts.

But the leading ICs have opposed such ideas.

The principle and concept of responsibility of Northern governments to ensure transfer of technology on fair and equitable terms, and with necessary funding to finance technology transfers owned by private enterprises, to the Third World to adopt measures to safeguard or promote environmental protection has been accepted in the CFC protocol for example.

However, a number of Third World developmental economists and institutions who have been looking at the "environment and sustainable development" shaping up, and some of the proposals of leading ICs like the U.S. which the New Delhi Centre for Science and Environment have dubbed as "environmental colonialism", feel the need for a wider and broader approach.

They feel that the approach in the CFC protocol would not be enough in terms of the wider issues of "sustainable development" and eradication of poverty in the countries of the South.

Some of the compensation schemes, such as so-called "farmers rights" in respect of genes from plants grown in the Third World, whatever their merits in terms of plant-breeders right, is seen as woefully inadequate in terms of the biotechnology and gene manipulations, merely amounting to "robbing Peter and paying a small tithe of it back as compensation".

There are also some much wider issues as to the effect of the extension of intellectual property rights in this area, such as neglect of fundamental research towards sustainable agriculture.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision that "micro-organisms" could be patented, according to Michael Hansen of the Washington-based Consumer Policy Institute, has resulted in corporations and even universities and public research institutions moving into neglect of such research in favour of more profitable areas of activity.

This has resulted in neglect of classical biological control or ecological control studies, and even abandonment of biological control as a discipline in some major universities, Hansen notes in an article in the January issue of the "Global Pesticide Campaigner", news letter of the Pesticide Action Network.

"Thought-intensive pest control research ... does not generate commodities that can be marketed. Training a farmer how to implement an intercropping system or a crop rotation system to deal with lepidopteran pest problems does not offer the opportunity for large profits, whereas selling them plants generally engineered with bacillus thuringiensis endotoxin gene does", Hansen points out.

"The U.S. Congress can now allocate funds to ‘biological control’ and to ‘sustainable agriculture’ only to see those funds used to develop biological insecticides, herbicides, or fungicides through genetic engineering. In the process basic ecological and taxonomic work essential for development of sustainable agriculture is displaced".

It is not clear whether the UNCED and its preparatory processes, concerned as "Agenda 21" is supposed to be with the wider issues of "environment and sustainable development" can or will address some of these wider issues of intellectual/industrial property and the adaptation of the system towards these wider goals.