commissioner.org
| Source | Doug Henwood |
| Date | 04/02/19/17:45 |
| Julio Huato quoted Jagdish Bhagwati:
>Even now, despite all the talk about >poverty alleviation, the World Bank's staff, research, and aid are being >used, I suspect, in a way that, instead of calling into serious doubt the >economic logic of IPP, can be interpreted as contributing to the know-how >that will eventually enable rich countries to get poor countries to set up >administrative machinery to enforce intellectual property rights for the >benefit of the rich countries. Here's an excerpt from the interview Liza Featherstone & I did with Bhagwati in early 2001. It's a rough transcript - apologies for the (lack of) punctuation & capitalization. Doug ---- DH: when the united states was a developing country, it violated patents, stole all kinds of things, defaulted on debt frequently, [JB: exactly!] erected all kinds of protectionist barriers. A country today is forbidden to do any of those things. JB: lets take protection. We did it just for pharmaceuticals. In my judgement. The fundamental principle for putting an issue into the WTOŠhas to be mutuality of gain, because that's what we teach in the classroom. If you enter into a trade agreement with me which is non-coercive, and let's assume the governments are reasonably reflective of their people's interests, maybe there are imperfections, we could say that about every -- you could then argue that this is mutually beneficial, that's what we teach in the classroom. I also teach exceptions to that and there are two kinds of exceptions. One is that a third country can still get hurt. If I you and I have a mutually beneficial trade agreement, it reduces the demand for her exports. Then she gets hurt. She's the bystander, and yet she gets hurt. In that case if you're a poor country we must have a trigger mechanism to help you out. Because we cant just go by general assertion that it's mutually beneficialŠ Is this relevant in practice? Yes because in the uruguay round what happened was the nature of the bargain was such that practically all the detailed studies that I saw suggested that africa would get hurt. African countries are the poorest in the world today. We should have had a major trigger mechanism where the bank and the fund would have been brought into play, bilaterally, to compensate these countries. So this is the way international coordination should work, that we should focus on the poor, the way I was forced to do when I was looking at the bottom 30 % of indian poor and what was the best way to bring them up to snuff. Two you take the banana case, perfectly sensible WTO finding, that discriminatory trade agreements no longer have a place. But who gets hurt by this? Decision between EU and us, we were doing it for dole, not the dole senator but dole company, butŠ.the people who get hurt are in the small caribbean countries and the extent of the loss from this would be something like a third of their national income. Huge loss for them, very little sumŠwe should immediately have a triggerŠwhat do we do in things like kyoto and things, we actually go and help the poor countries, we buy their agreement. But when the WTO gets involved in the act, nobody, people are left to their own devices. That's what's wrong. So I have been arguing that we really need to look at even the trade side, to make sure thatŠthe very poor are in fact not hurt. And in fact are compensated very energetically, proactively whenever dispute settlements are worked out that hurt the poor countries, whenever we have big trade agreements which may adversely affect the poor countries. But generally the organizing principle is mutality of gainŠ.we are violating the principle of mutuality of gain, which is the only principleŠ turning the WTO into something like a loan shark operation, using it to collect royalties. I think its crazy. I was the only one who wrote about this in 1991 and no one would listen. We cleverly turned the argument away from cost benefit analysis, which is what economists love, this is the utilitarian logic. And we turned it into the right's logic, namely piracy and theft. And as soon as you call it piracy and theft, it's fine with ayn rand and maybe with nozick up to a point but in the public domain it means those guys, we should whip them. we couldn't prove it on utilitarian grounds it was really beneficial to those countries so we immediately turned it into piracy and theft, and to our people, because they didn't even know they were being hoodwinked by a shift in economic philosophical argument, from cost-benefit to an I invented it therefore its mine kind of arguement. So we cheated. Badly. Now the unions etc, are saying look you did it for corporations, or for capital, now you can do it for us. Environmental groups are saying what about doing it for nature? Real divide is beginning, the people who put it in, unfortunately democrats, it happened under our watch, that is creating. Capital or the corporations are our corporations, not those of the poor countries. And now, I tell my labor friends, these are good principles, but if we now say, you did it for capital now do it for us, poor countries are going to say look, you did it for your corporations. Now you're saying because your unions are really woried about international competition you should again do it for your unions. If you're going to do it for these shrimp turtle etc where the defendants tend to be poor countries, which don't have the autonomy to choose their own path and their own values. All of these then become like daggers aimed at poor countries. So its not that people are against environmental agendas or against removing child labor as expeditiously as possible. But the see the WTO being turned by us into instruments of assault, which are defined by lobbies, and not their lobbies. This is where the north/south divide reallyŠ. What we did with IPP was to open up the system to a whole lot of lobbies, which can only be at our end because very few lobbies at the other end have the clout to be able to do anything. IPP, I think we really did something quite wrong. The other day on an indian meeting vandana shiva was talking about intellectual property from quite a different perspective, bio-piracy. And she said many of the developing countries had developed their own knowhow on using all kinds of genetic material from the rain forest and if you were improving on it you should pay some sort of royalty because this is age-old knowledge, etc. which you are building. You cant rule it out altogether it's an interesting argument actually, [laughs] I sided with her pointing out some of the things on IPP, there were all these people like [winston lord??] and the whole establishment of this cfr and the business establishment, they thought I was a green man from mars for a change. [laughs] They are unable to face this! we forced WTO into thisŠthe poor countries are at the receiving end. When you go back to the bank, what are we doing on technical assistance to africaŠworld bank aid is going to these countries setting up these mechanism so that our IP rights are going to be enforced! That's technical assistance? I feel that a lot of us just don't know what's going on and if we didn't have NGOs, I'm indulgent toward them because if we didn't have them we just wouldn't begin to find out some of these things. Of course this I heard from someone inside the bank, who also doesn't agree with IPR. Why the bank should be used for this purpose. If people really found out this what they were doingŠwolfensohn all this rhetoric that im changing the bank in the right direction, would begin to look a little less persuasive, [laughs] he should really be raising these questions about IPR. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho