A 19-year-old girl named Kua lies dying in a rural village in southern Africa, where she has lived all her life. She is afflicted with AIDS, the result of an HIV infection she contracted during a sexual assault when she left her village to fetch water a few years ago.
Her family has spent its meagre resources in a struggle to restore her health. But those resources cannot cover the cost of the antiretroviral (ARV) drugs that are used to treat HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, and Kua's decline has continued. Why is Kua facing the likelihood of an early death while there are drugs that could save her life? That is one of many questions raised in the book Property Rights, Indigenous People and the Developing World, written by Dr David Lea, a professor of philosophy at American University of Sharjah (AUS). The book, which examines how indigenous people and the developing world are affected by the physical and intellectual property laws of the West, in part suggests that were it not for these laws, many lives that have been lost might have been saved.
Dr Lea notes that intellectual property laws, enforced through the World Trade Organisation (WTO), grant drug companies 20 years of exclusive rights to the production and marketing of medications they develop. In the past, many developing countries were able to buy cheap generic ARV drugs from countries such as India, where patent laws did not apply. India joined the WTO in 1995 and in 2005 updated its patent law to meet WTO requirements as a condition of membership.
Until the change in 2005, Indian pharmaceutical companies had produced reasonably priced generic versions of drugs produced in western jurisdictions such as the US and the EU and sold them cheaply in poor regions such as sub-Saharan Africa. But today, India and other developing countries cannot produce cheap generics for sale in poor countries. As a result Kua has had to go without ARV drugs while her health steadily declines.
Dr Lea's book, released by the Boston company Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, argues that the crisis facing Kua's family and many others in the developing world is just one example of the harm caused by western intellectual property laws. Regarding physical property rights, the book pinpoints land rights as the main problem for the indigenous people of the West, mainly the Aborigines of Australia and the Native Americans of the US. According to the book, western governments established corporations to manage land and development for their indigenous populations. But the book argues that this is not a good model for indigenous people because it gives them neither "control rights" nor "income rights". As a result, indigenous people end up mere bystanders in the development schemes that are meant to be helping them.
Unfortunately the developing world is not doing well either on physical property issues, Dr Lea argues in the book. "Third world countries that appeared to follow the solution proposed by dependency theorists, and attempted to escape the cycle of poverty by severing links with the developed world and instituting self-reliant socialist regimes did not meet with spectacular success," he wrote. He counts Papua New Guinea among countries that used a model of customary communal ownership of land and failed in the endeavour because individuals asserted private ownership of land.
"The idea which led to this book started in 2004 when I was asked by Dr Robert Cook, who was then the dean of AUS's College of Arts and Sciences to design and start teaching a course on 'ethics for computing and IT'," Dr Lea says. His research for the course drew him to property rights issues and particularly how they affect indigenous people. He observed that indigenous people and the people in the developing world were missing out on many of the technological advances in the computer and IT industries mainly because of the WTO's enforcement of property rights laws. Many of the leading IT companies, such as Microsoft, after they finish writing their new software, incur no extra costs for usage by poor people in the developing world.
But property rights laws allow these companies to charge for these necessary products the same price in the developing world as they charge in the developed world. As a result many in the developing world who cannot afford these prices are being left behind in the technology era. Before these ideas evolved into a book, Dr Lea wrote a number of papers on property rights and their effects on indigenous people. Some of these papers are included in the book, reproduced with the permission of the journals in which they first appeared.
Dr Lea, who has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Ottawa in Canada, says the book is mainly a textbook for international and development studies. But it is also a resource book for international aid groups and policymakers so that they may be able to understand better the needs of the indigenous people and re-focus their policies and their aid. business@thenational.ae