From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

FROM POVERTY TO POWER• Establish international guidelines on the balance betweenpublic interest and incentives for innovation, and give priorityto ensuring that knowledge and innovation is placed at theservice of development, perhaps through an ‘InternationalConvention on Access to Knowledge’. Examples of approachesbased on access to knowledge include the open source movementthat generated the Linux computer operating systemand the user-generated free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.• Explore alternative ways of encouraging research anddevelopment into pressing issues (health, climate change).These could include increasing public funding and ‘advancemarket commitments’, whereby aid donors promise topurchase large quantities of a yet-to-be-invented medicine orvaccine for particular health problems at a negotiated price.A suggestion by Joseph Stiglitz is to offer a large prize for theinvention of a drug, on the proviso that it is not placed underpatent and can go straight to generic production.The current system of global rules on knowledge is a severe and growingobstacle to development. It drives up inequality, creating a world oftechnological haves and have-nots, stifles innovation even in theNorth,and in the worst cases constitutes little more than what economistscall ‘rent seeking’. The obstacles to changing it are not intellectual –there are any number of good reform proposals – but political. Thosecorporate leaders with a longer-term understanding of the need totackle inequality and poverty must rein in their lobbyists, whilepoliticians in both North and South must show leadership and curbthe kinds of backdoor political influence that allow short-termcorporate self-interest to stop knowledge flowing in the global economy.Such changes require active, informed citizens, as the case of SouthAfrica’s Treatment Action Campaign shows (see page 242). They alsorequire effective states, able to stand up to pressures in trade negotiationsor in their own courts in the interests of tackling poverty andinequality. Developing-country governments, backed by public pressureat home and internationally, have become increasingly assertive indefending their citizens’ right to health and knowledge. It is vital thatthey are allowed and encouraged to do so.332