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Technology got the planet into this mess – but technology can also get
us out of it. So the UN’s mammoth Earth Summit, to be held in Rio de Janeiro
this June, will be told by most delegates from the poor South as well as
those from the rich North. But is it true? And, if it is, how can the world
ensure that the four-fifths of the planet’s population living in poor countries
gain access to the new ‘green’ technologies now being created in the laboratories
of the West?

Technologists from the industrialised countries believe that they are
beginning to grapple with global environmental problems, cutting pollution
and using natural resources more efficiently. But they fear that progress
is threatened by the desire of poor nations to better their lot. Mostafa
Tolba, the Egyptian head of the UN Environment Programme, said at a technology
transfer conference at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London
last year: ‘If these countries develop using the obsolete, inefficient production
techniques that the rich countries used to generate their wealth, then our
destruction is assured.’ The challenge at the Earth Summit, he says, is
‘to ensure that the clean technologies now being developed are made available
to the poor countries, and that they are affordable’. He sees technologies
that minimise waste as the single most important hope for conserving the
environment.

The phrase used to describe this process is ‘technology transfer’. It
permeates the mountains of paperwork already produced for the summit. Yet
its meaning remains ill-defined, and it rests on dangerous premises. It
feeds the Western image of itself as the fount of technological wisdom:
one fear of Third World governments is that Western environmental concerns
will be used as a weapon to increase control over the economies of poor
nations by forcing greater dependence on Western technologies. And it reinforces
the desire of many aggrieved governments of those poor nations to extract
cash and other favours from the rich.

Almost every government delegate at the Earth Summit will make ritual
calls for increased technology transfer as a key element in ‘turning words
into action’ to save the planet. British negotiators report that Third World
nations regard access to Western environmentally-friendly technologies ‘as
of almost equal importance to financial resources’.

The ironic result, as one leading Third World green, Anil Agarwal of
India’s Centre for Science and the Environment points out, is that ‘those
Western countries who have been the most immoral in environmental terms
are now preaching to those who have been most frugal and sparing’. Environmentalists
in New York, their city’s neon lights visible from space, presume to devise
energy-saving strategies for Africa when New York uses more electricity
than the entire ‘dark continent’ from the Sahara to the Limpopo.

The average American contributes twenty times more to the greenhouse
effect than the average Indian. Logically, Americans ought to seek out India’s
green ways of living, not vice versa. But life is not so simple, largely
because of the desire of Third World nations to take the cheap and dirty
road to industrialisation that the West followed decades before. For some,
such as Tolba, curbing this process is the world’s most pressing environmental
challenge.

The contrast between environmental policies in the West and the Third
World is stark. Energy efficiency has improved by more than 20 per cent
in the West in the past two decades. Despite continued economic growth,
carbon dioxide emissions in the US were less in the late 1980s than in the
late 1970s. And better waste-water treatment plant and flue-gas scrubbers
have brought spectacular reductions in river pollution and acid rain in
the West.

Meanwhile, the black smoke pouring from the factory chimneys of India
and China, the smogs of Mexico City, the destruction of tropical rainforest
from the Amazon to Borneo, the African irrigation projects that dry out
more fields than they water – all testify to the power of outdated Western
technologies to wreak havoc in the South. The inefficiencies of the Nigerian
oil industry are so great that it flares off enough natural gas from its
oilfields to serve the entire energy needs of most of Africa.

The grossness of this pollution and waste means that there is huge
potential for cheap improvements, however. Toufiq Siddiqi, energy specialist
at the East-West Centre in Hawaii, says: ‘Every $10 invested in energy-generating
efficiency in China could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by one tonne.’

But to point out the potential of cleaner industrial development in
the Third World is not the same as showing that what is needed is more Western
technology. Still less that, as many Third World governments complain, the
West is operating a cartel to keep the technology out of their hands. For,
in general, advanced technology is a long way down the list of what is required.
Far from being locked up behind expensive patent barriers in the laboratories
of the West, the devices best placed to bring the most spectacular gains,
especially in energy efficiency and reducing pollution, are decidedly low
technology, and often pay for themselves within a year or two.

For instance, proper maintenance and pipe lagging on China’s 400 000
small industrial boilers, which consume 300 million tonnes of coal each
year, could reduce fuel consumption and pollution by 30 per cent, bringing
their efficiency close to Western levels, says Siddiqi.

TRANSFER THE EXPERTISE

In any case, the record for the successful introduction of advanced
technologies in the Third World is very poor, especially in Africa. John
Coleman, ICI’s environmental affairs manager, says that ‘technology transfer
is a social not an industrial problem; it is not about handing over blueprints,
it is about ensuring that (the technologies) will work’.

A report by management consultants Touche Ross for Britain’s Earth
Summit negotiators dismissed the purported barrier to Third World countries
gaining access to technologies for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
‘Developing countries generally have access to the required technologies.
This is more a perceived than a real barrier.’ The really beneficial technologies
were not pieces of equipment, but the ‘soft’ technologies – training in
operation and maintenance methods, in particular – which have been ‘historically
²Ô±ð²µ±ô±ð³¦³Ù±ð»å’.

Touche Ross investigated the role of technology transfer in both combating
the greenhouse effect and conserving biological diversity. In each case
it rejected the idea that patents and the growing panoply of intellectual
property rights were a significant barrier to technology transfer. ‘Intellectual
property rights in fact facilitate the flow of scientific knowledge, by
making information about innovations publicly available,’ said the company.

The real barriers to successful technology transfer from the West to
the Third World are much harder for governments to deal with. A study of
technology policies for the ASCEND 21 conference in Vienna last December,
at which scientists discussed the agenda for the Earth Summit, noted ‘the
failure of developing countries fully to use technological information in
the public domain – (for example) patents that have expired’. And it concluded
that ‘the ability to assimilate technology, not barriers to transfer, is
the primary impediment. Relaxation of intellectual property and licensing
restrictions will not necessarily lead to greater technology transfer.’

And when nongovernment groups met in Paris last December to prepare
their own ‘action plan’ for the Earth Summit, they concluded: ‘The view
that technology can be transferred from North to South has been proved wrong.
A technology which involves mere transfer of machines and chemicals will
last as long as the creators of the material are around.’ What is needed,
they argued, ‘is the training of people in skills and technologies to allow
people to creatively adapt, innovate and invent new technologies appropriate
to their needs and societies’.

MAKING MORE OF NATURAL RESOURCES

Many technologists in the South reject their governments’ desire for
the latest Western technology. For instance, S. Varadarajan, a leading Indian
industrialist and former director-general of the country’s Council of Scientific
and Industrial Research, says: ‘We in India need things that we can repair,
not black boxes that have to be replaced. We need to install technology
slowly, in stages. And there should be some link between the introduced
technology and the local community. The local area should provide some resource,
or the process should use some local knowledge.’

Many of these issues have emerged sharply in the most politically charged
area of debate about technology transfer, that of biotechnology. It has
come to the fore during discussions about a global treaty for preserving
biological diversity. The treaty is intended to be signed by world leaders
at the Earth Summit.

Most of the planet’s surviving biodiversity – whether the measure is
a simple count of wild species, wild strains of important food crops, or
functioning ecosystems – is in the tropics. But countries such as Brazil,
Indonesia and India resist the claim, made by Western governments and environmentalists
alike, that biodiversity is a global heritage. As the eight South American
signatories of the Amazon Pact, a loose accord among them, asserted in February,
‘biological resources are without doubt the natural resources of the countries
which exercise sovereignty over them’.

They reject, too, the idea that their rainforests, home to perhaps half
the world’s species, should be preserved for the benefit of the rest of
the planet – not least because they believe that food and pharmaceuticals
companies based in the rich northern countries stand to make most money
from this ‘global resource’. According to Agarwal: ‘The high-sounding plea
of the common heritage of humankind is a rhetorical device to disguise continued
±ð³æ±è±ô´Ç¾±³Ù²¹³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô.’

The key to the wealth locked up in the rainforests, they believe, is
biotechnology, in particular the manipulation of genes that will allow the
genetic attributes of wild plants found in the rainforests or grasslands
of the tropics to be given to cultivated plants. Among food crops, the genes
might code for resistance to particular pests or frosts, reduce growing
times or increase yields.

A recent report on Guyana’s forests for the Commonwealth Secretariat
said that breakthroughs in biotechnology had ‘greatly enhanced the potential
economic value of Guyana’s rich genetic estate’. But the fear in the tropics
is that within a few decades, biotechnologists will ransack their countries
for genetic resources that they will take home and hoard in Western gene
banks.

A typical example of how Third World governments feel exploited arose
when the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture found under cultivation
in northern Nigeria a strain of cowpea that was unusually resistant to weevils,
which often eat a large part of the cowpea harvest. The institute employed
researchers from the University of Durham in the north of England to isolate
the source of this resistance, which turned out to be a molecule called
trypsin inhibitor that interferes with the metabolism of the weevil. Then
a venture capital company at the university found and took out a patent
on the gene that codes for the molecule, and began licensing seed companies
to incorporate it in a number of different crops.

Sales of genetically engineered weevil-resistant crops may still be
a decade away. But Nigeria has little hope of ever charging a royalty for
the skills of its farmers, stretching perhaps over hundreds of years, in
selectively breeding the weevil-resistant cowpea. This was underlined when
the British researchers, after doing their research on Nigerian plants,
decided to obtain the gene from a Californian variety of cowpea.

Genetic resources are not, as consultants Touche Ross told the British
government, a ‘biological oil strike’. If Third World countries are to make
money from them, they must develop the technologies to exploit them. The
prospects for doing this may appear small. Touche Ross argued that this
is not because the secrets are locked up: ‘There are no major constraints
to the transfer of the science which underpins biotechnology.’ Rather, it
is because many countries lack the trained scientists and the institutional
backup to benefit from their genetic resources.

But they do possess one priceless, but usually undervalued, asset: local
knowledge. In the Amazon rainforest, for instance, only the local Indian
communities know in detail what plants and insects are in their forests
and what medicinal, pest-resistant and other properties they hold. In recent
years, pharmaceuticals researchers have tried to tap this expertise, calling
it a ‘race against time’ before modern ways erode the knowledge base of
the forest communities.

The US government’s National Cancer Institute tests 10 000 plants, algae,
fungi and other organisms each year, looking for cancer cures. It receives
roots, leaves and other specimens from travelling botanists, but makes increasing
use of shamans, or traditional healers, and their encyclopaedic knowledge
of the botany of their homelands.

Gordon Cragg, chief of the institute’s natural products branch, recently
wrote that ‘we used to view these healers as practitioners of black magic
or voodoo. But over the past five years, a more organised study of plants
used by these practitioners has made us realise how important and immense
their knowledge really is.’ Already these researchers have turned up two
plants – a Samoan tree and a Cameroon creeper – that appear able to fight
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Technology transfer is suddenly no longer a one-way street, it is a
dialogue. As Third World governments and tribal communities realise the
potential value of their knowledge, it will become a potent commodity in
the technology transfer business. The knowledge held in the shamans’ huts
and in farming communities may be as vital to planetary salvation as that
held in the laboratories of the North. Agarwal says: ‘Developing countries
must not sign the biodiversity convention unless it reduces the existing
asymmetries in access to knowledge and technology.’

Equally encouraging is the potential for South-South transfers of knowledge
and expertise. Vietnamese biotechnologists, for instance, have recently
used genetic material supplied by the International Potato Center in Peru
to develop potato varieties that can thrive in Vietnam’s climate. They are
now at work on improved coffee varieties. In neighbouring Thailand, the
National Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology has tapped the
expertise of British university researchers, funded by the British Council
and the Royal Society, to develop a local starch industry using native cassava.

This kind of technology transfer, the local development of products
and processes tailor-made for local conditions, and the exchange of ideas
between countries at similar stages of development, is a more promising
model for successful technology transfer than blindly importing alien Western
technologies. Looked at this way, indigenous knowledge is at least as valuable
to Third World countries as Western scientific skills. The trick is to marry
the two.

Fred Pearce will be reporting from Rio on the Earth Summit for New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´.