From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

FROM POVERTY TO POWERresearch efforts have centred on male-controlled prevention methods.In sub-Saharan Africa, where the target population is primarilyheterosexual and women’s bargaining power over sex is limited, aprevention method that could be controlled by women and would notblock procreation is an urgent need. Recent initiatives have sought tofill the gap, but a breakthrough is still years away. Likewise, anaffordable female condom that could protect millions of women fromHIV infection has still not been developed.The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, hopes tohelp correct this bias by offering grants to fund R&D for neglecteddiseases. The UK, Canada, and other governments are offering whatthey call ‘advance market commitments’: a guarantee to buy bulk suppliesof new vaccines in order to encourage research. The basic idea is notnew. In 1714 the British government offered £20,000 – a fortune at thetime – to whoever could invent a way of measuring longitude at sea.The offer worked: by 1735 the clockmaker and inventor John Harrisonhad produced an accurate maritime chronometer. 65Research is increasingly dominated by the private sector. In agriculture,five large multinational companies – Bayer, Dow Agro,DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta – spend $7.3bn per year onagricultural research. This is more than 18 times the budget of thepublicly funded Consultative Group on International AgriculturalResearch. 66 Left to its own devices, private sector research will respondto future opportunities for profit, not public need (although the twomay coincide), so tropical diseases or improved varieties of the staplefoods of poor communities, such as cassava and sorghum, are likely tobe overlooked in favour of high-value, high-profit products.R&D may benefit people living in poverty, even when it is dominatedby the wealthy and run by the private sector. But it is less likelyto improve their prospects than R&D geared more closely to theirneeds, and may run greater risks. Biotechnology, for example, maywell produce drought-resistant strains of seeds that become an essentialtool for adapting to climate change. However, it could also erode thegenetic diversity on which developing-country farmers rely, and placeexcessive power in the hands of transnational corporations throughtheir control of seed strains.56