African Highlights from Access to Knowledge A Guide for Everyone

African Highlights from Access to Knowledge A Guide for Everyone

By Afro Ng'ombe   Friday, September 10, 2010   No comments:

The 1709 Blog has a post giving an overview of the 2nd Edition of Access to Knowledge A Guide for Everyone (large pdf file), but Afro-Leo wanted to make special mention here of a number of portions of the book specifically highlighting Africa.

Anti-Counterfeiting in East Africa

The book discusses the EAC Anti-Counterfeits Bill, Uganda’s Counterfeit Goods Bill and Kenya’s Anti-Counterfeit Act of 2008 in terms of the Millennium Development Goals,

“East African countries were facing the risk not attaining the millennium development goal (MDG) on universal treatment of people living withHIV and AIDS, malaria and other diseases if the region’s parliaments adopted the anti-counterfeits policy and bill under consideration in the region, the IPS report also noted.”

Afro-Leo recommends reading the excellent coverage by fellow Lions on Kenya’s Anti-Counterfeit Bill with follow-up.

Internet Access

Intellectual property laws are not the only barrier to accessing knowledge.  When resources are legally available but physically unattainable, they knowledge remains as inaccessible.  In relation to this, the book discusses the recent improvements in internet access across the continent (p. 110).  But, as the book points out, internet without opportunities to access it or an understanding of how to use it is useless.  The Kenya Education Network Trust is given as an example of good institutional support for use of the internet, and promoting information and communication technologies. [Another source, Technology Times reports that Nigeria is also working nationally on this issue, potentially appointing a Minister of ICT.

In addition to national programs like the one in Kenya, many people in African countries also have the opportunity to learn about and use the internet through the large number of non-governmental organizations operating across the continent.  As connection points and knowledge about how to utilize the internet increase, the cost of computers are decreasing, resulting in more opportunities for people to actually use the internet on a regular basis.

New Types of Patents

The book address three types of patents with distinct ramifications for Africa and other parts of the developing world: pharmaceutical patents (p. 51), agricultural patents (p. 53), and biopiracy-based patents (p. 55).  Most people following intellectual property issues in Africa are familiar with the debates around pharmaceutical patents: Preventable diseases go untreated because patented medicines are expensive, but if drug developers aren’t rewarded with patent rights, will they make the huge investments required to discover new breakthroughs.  The book discusses the history of patents and phrama and puts for some alternative systems.

“One view on the abuse of pharmaceutical patents is that perhaps patents were the wrong mechanism for funding pharmaceutical production all along.”

Agricultural patents, like pharmaceutical patents, deal with an important component of daily survival, food security.  As new types of seeds are patented, seeds that produce sterile plants, farmers are faced with the possibility of having to pay large amounts of money for seeds they used to just keep from the previous year’s harvest.  Although most African farmers still save their seeds and replant, these countries may move closer to the industrialized country model of planting sterile-plant seeds as companies develop seeds specifically for the various unique growing conditions across Africa.

Biopiracy-based patents are patents generally obtained by companies in industrialized countries who have ‘discovered’ some new compound or plant that a local community has been using for a very long time.  This is an area that overlaps greatly with Traditional Knowledge and Genetic Resources.  While the book acknowledges this as a problem - “The failure to address issues related to traditional knowledge and bioresources even whilst ratcheting upward the protection granted to new inventions doubly jeopardises developing countries.” – this is one place where there’s no potential solutions offered.

Broader Level Points

Other areas of the text that may be of interest with respect to Africa (page numbers or of the pdf, not the printed numbers on the page):

• Background discussion of the Doha Declaration and Development Agenda, p.23.
• Libraries as players in Access to Knowledge, with mention of Bibliotheca Alexandria in Egypt, p. 28
• Academia as a player in Access to Knowledge, with mention of the Wits University LINK Centre in South Africa, p. 29
• Section 2.1.1 Copyright law and developing countries, p. 41
• The United State’s Special 301 Report’s effect on developing countries, p. 63
• Open Access activities in developing countries, p. 78
• Electronic libraries in developing countries, p. 76

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INTERPOL: too little, too late?

INTERPOL: too little, too late?

By Jeremy   Wednesday, December 10, 2008   No comments:

In "Rapid Rise In African Anti-Counterfeiting Efforts Led By Developed Nations", Nick Wadhams (writing for Intellectual Property Watch) describes the activities of international law enforcement agency INTERPOL in bringing national authorities in Africa up to speed on the threat faced by those who depend on the imports, from hospital patients to pharmacists to farmers. One of INTERPOL's programmes is OASIS-Africa, the initiative that led to the seizure of more than 100 kinds of medical products, including anti-malarial pills, multivitamins, skin medicines and heart drugs in Uganda and Tanzania. The article then goes on to outline the scale of the problem, which is vast and endemic, the damage it causes, the shifting tactics of the counterfeiters and the apparent indifference or slow response on the part of countries from which counterfeit product is sourced.

Reading this article, one wonders whether the activities of INTERPOL and its backers might be characterised as "too little, too late". There is also a sense of helplessness and lack of resolve on the part of Africa as the victim continent. Imagine if African nations were accused by China of supplying that country with counterfeit medical and other products: would the Chinese response be so ineffective? It seems most unlikely. But African middlemen are presumably among those who profit most from the peddling of these products, aided by largely poor consumers whose option for treatment is bounded as much by their lack of spending power as anything else.

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New initiative, more jobs for bureaucrats?

New initiative, more jobs for bureaucrats?

By Jeremy   Friday, August 08, 2008   No comments:

In "Anti-Counterfeiting Initiative Aimed At Protecting African Medical Industries", written for the excellent IP Watch, Wagdy Sawahel reviews the communiqué that followed “Protecting the consumer against counterfeit products through interagency and sub-regional collaboration,” a workship organised by the Food and Drugs Board in collaboration with the Ghanaian Institute of Packaging and the coalition against counterfeit and illicit trade. The conclusion of the workshop was that

"West African people should establish a medical anti-counterfeiting task force to promote local herbal medicines by protecting indigenous knowledge and genetic property and establishing benefit-sharing systems in addition to tackling the spread of cheap, fake medicines that are causing an unnecessary loss of life".

To protect the local medical industries, this task force would prepare a mechanism for reporting counterfeit issues, including its harmful effect on local economy and health, launching awareness creation programmes as well as advising governments and local companies on ways to increase the use of security features on their products including medicines, cosmetics and medical devices.

The bit that depresses this writer is this:

"Besides having a permanent secretariat and four subcommittees, namely, legislation and regulation, public education and awareness creation, information and intelligence gathering, and human resource and capacity development, the task force is expected to have representatives from government, industry, trade associations and consumers".

This is another example of the establishment of bureaucratic structures in response to devastatingly dangerous threats to health, safety and the economic well-being of millions of people.

The counterfeiters are tremendously successful. They make large sums of money with the willing connivance of many helpers, including distributors, retailers and in many cases consumers. They pay no taxes and, despite the large scale of their combined operations, take surprisingly little risk. Notably, they have no secretariats, executive structures, committees, subcommittees, governing bodies, task-forces and panels of experts representing industry, government and consumers. It is increasingly becoming the belief of this writer that the only effective way to deal with counterfeiters is to run anticounterfeiting operations in much the same way -- little or no bureaucratic burden, short chains of command and control, adequate funding at ground level and financial incentives for success. Do any of the readers of this weblog think along the same lines?

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