Draft G8 Declaration for Heiligendamm leaked: an agenda against the South
A first internal draft of a declaration for the coming G8 summit has been leaked. The Washington-based NGO Oil Change International published the 21-page text on its website. The document entitled Growth and Responsibility in the Global Economy obviously comprises the economic policy part of the planned summit document. There is nothing on the implementation of promises made at the G8 summit at Gleneagles and the Africa policy announced as the second focus of the German G8 agenda. The individual chapters deal with the issues of global imbalance, international investment, innovation protection, climate change and energy efficiency as well as raw materials security and transparency.
Above all the chapters on “investment freedom, investment environment and social responsibility” and “promoting innovation—protecting innovation” show that the German government intends to use the summit to impose an anti-South agenda. Thus it wants to mobilise against the emerging economies for their alleged “new investment protectionism” and further strengthen patent law and intellectual property instruments against product piracy. However, both the political control of foreign investment (which can include unequal treatment) and the imitation of products and production processes were always first order development factors.
1 Comments:
I don't agree to your general conclusion, that product piracy and violations of intelectual property rigths are always necessarly a part of early stages of development. There are of course some historical cases, i. e. MADE IN GERMANY, which might support your argument.
Nowadays you migth find serious reasons to be concerned about product piracy even from a developmental point of view. Just look to the May 7th issue of the IHT and you learn that hundreds of innocent people have died in Panama because they took fake drugs made in PR of China. Similar serious accidents took place in places like Bangladesh. The unregulated distribution of fake pesticides in China and other places has serious consequences for humans as well the environment. There also exists a market for counterfeit spare parts for the aviation and motor industries. Faked drugs, pesticides and spare parts normally occur in countries, which do not have the regulatory capacity for tight controls of the markets. The producers of counterfeits do not gentlemenlike cheat the powerfull multinationals in order to deliver good quality for a reasonable price. Many victims of fake drugs and car accidents could be still alife if countries like China would intensify their combat against this new kind of organized crime.
This doesn't mean that some important aspects of the current discourse on intelectual property should not put into question. But the issue is to serious to leave it only to those who have a commercial interest.
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