Biotechnology tends to be the preserve of the world's richest nations. It is the rich who run biotechnology companies, it is the rich who fund them, and it is the rich who consume their products. Developing countries don't really get a look. Biotechnology's medicines are too expensive. Its patented crops and seeds are too inaccessible. And, in any case, for the most part, those products are not the medicines and crops that people in developing nations want or need. It should not come as a surprise to any one that the priorities of the rich, capitalist nations are not those of the rest of the world. Of a total $70 billion spent on health care research worldwide in 1998, for instance, only $100 million was set aside for malaria research (about a tenth of the cost of the US Department of Defense's recent “experiment” of intercepting a ballistic missile with a ground-launched exo-atmospheric kill vehicle).

Without doubt, the developing world could benefit from biotechnology. The world's poorest nations are home to 98% of all children who die before their fifth birthday (many from malnutrition and starvation), and 99% of all people who succumb to infectious diseases like tuberculosis, measles, tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough. Crassly, one could define these needs as “market opportunities”. The argument is certainly being made—most recently in a Human Development 2001 report from the United Nations—that poorer countries should make biotechnology development an urgent priority.

But many are saying that inequities in the patent system—particularly the World Trade Organization TRIPs (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights) agreement—are repressing biotechnology in poor countries, allowing multinational corporations to establish monopolies, drive out local competition, divert research away from the needs of poor countries, and force up the prices of drugs and seeds. The recent wrangles between Western drug companies and the governments of South Africa and Brazil (see p. 698) are a case in point.

What seems to be getting lost in all this is that a balance must be struck between the rights of rich-world companies to recoup the cost of developing (both successful and failed) products and the plight of nations too poor to buy the products they need.

Biotechnology is difficult enough to achieve in places where markets are lucrative, R&D spending is high, and commercial practices are predictable. It is hard to imagine how it can succeed in countries where R&D expenditure is a fraction of GDP (usually less than a quarter of that in developed nations), skilled and educated labor is at a priority, inflation is rampant, investors fear for their property rights (or lives), and political turmoil is constant.

In this environment, it might be appropriate if there was a formal commitment to be more flexible about the imposition of intellectual property on researchers in developing countries. We must give developing world research a chance to foster its own biotechnology to address its own problems. Once these countries have formed an industrial base mature enough to foster homegrown innovation, patent enforcement will become a matter of urgency and self-interest for them as well. That is the time when a level playing field for global intellectual property barriers will be appropriate.