Brazil's 'open and universal access' agenda undermines its own technological future.

• Author: Choate, Pat

The great riddle of 19th and early 20th Century economics was the role that technology exerted in economic progress versus the contributions of labor and capital. By the beginning of the 21st Century, most economists agreed that technological innovation was the motor of development and that its continuity and accumulated creations, what the Institutional Economists called "tools," furthered a progress that persistently reduced squalor and improved the life of nations.

Lawrence A. Kogan's article is in that tradition. His thesis is Brazil is undermining its national innovation efforts by policies and practices whose ultimate effect is to discourage the creativity of the Brazilian people and divert meaningful levels of direct foreign investment.

Kogan buttresses his argument with a detailed description of how the Government of Brazil has sent forth its diplomats to diffuse the concept of intellectual property rights in various international forums. First at the World Trade Organization (WTO), then the World Health Organization (WHO, and then at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), among others, he describes and analyses how Brazil has advanced an agenda of "open and universal access" which translates into a "taking" by the state of the creations of others and then making them publicly available without proper compensation, or often even acknowledgement. As a strategy, Brazil, he notes, is forum shopping, changing one provision here, and another there, all the while creating ever more holes in an already cheesy-like regime of global protections.

Unfortunately, Brazil and other developing countries are succeeding. As a condition for entering the Doha Round of WTO talks, Brazil led efforts to change the intellectual property protections for pharmaceuticals, allowing developing nations to force compulsory licensing and then produce patented medicines under terms largely decided by the government. Appropriately, Kogan points out that all except four or five of the more than 400 medicines now on the WHO critical medical list are generic, freely available for production by anyone in the world.

The principal problem is not that a handful of pharmaceutical companies are keeping medicines from peoples in Africa or other developing places, but that those governments do not enforce the integrity of pharmaceutical production inside their countries, nor do they ensure the integrity of the pharmaceutical distribution systems. So, the generic...