FEW people in the developing world realise that the Western model of
industrialisation and urbanisation is a highly toxic one. As they become
increasingly industrialised, all countries go through a period of intense air
and water pollution—as epitomised by London’s stinking Thames of the 1850s
and Tokyo’s choking atmosphere of the 1970s. Few of them shake it off entirely.
Those Western cities that are passably habitable have had to make major
investments in pollution control and prevention to become so. But when cities of
developing countries attempt to emulate the Western model they mistakenly try to
do it on the cheap and turn their habitat into a living hell.

As Asian cities become wealthier, they have run into serious air pollution
problems. Delhi is the richest city in India, but with 2.6 million vehicles, the
levels of suspended particulate matter in its atmosphere make it the fourth most
polluted city in the world. According to a World Bank survey, some 7500 people
die there from the effects of air pollution every year.

A large number of Delhi’s citizens now have enough money to buy the old,
highly polluting two-stroke scooters whose technology was imported from Italy in
the 1960s. With the arrival of low-cost Suzuki cars, the upper and middle-income
groups are rapidly becoming car owners. And what is happening in Delhi is slowly
happening in many cities across Southeast Asia as national economies grow.

What the East Asian experience reveals is that when economies grow at or near
10 per cent per year, and when industry accounts for the bulk of that growth,
the level of industrial pollution can rise very fast. The World Bank estimates
that while Thailand’s GDP roughly doubled between 1975 and 1989, most
atmospheric pollutants increased at least tenfold. In Indonesia, a World Bank
study of 11 common pollutants concludes that without radical change in
environmental policies or industrial practices, each will increase tenfold
between 1990 and 2020. Bangkok is today notorious for its traffic jams and air
pollution. Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai and others have all been in
a similar mess or still are.

However, pollution is not inevitable. If growing affluence is the key cause,
political stupidity and public indiscipline aggravate the situation. Singapore
avoided the urban nightmare through discipline and foresight. It became famous
for its firm ruling that only odd or even numbered vehicles should enter the
congested city centre on specific days. Later, it even restricted car ownership
by auctioning a limited number of permits each year to the highest bidders. Bit
by bit, it also invested in an excellent public transport system. In Delhi and
Bangalore, there have been no such efforts and in the absence of an efficient
“mass rapid transit system”, everybody wants a private vehicle.

Planning for a megacity such as Delhi in a poor country like India is not
easy. Large investments are needed to keep the environment clean and to provide
basic services such as schools, hospitals, transport and roads. But highly
subsidised, state-managed urban services have bred sloth and inefficiency. State
subsidies for water are justified on the grounds that they ensure supplies for
the urban poor. But the rich, who could afford to pay for their water, are also
subsidised, and so are inclined to be wasteful with their water.

While privatisation of urban services might encourage efficiency and force
city-dwellers to pay the true cost of urban living, it would also create serious
inequalities and leave the poor even poorer. How the does one bring efficiency
and economic viability together with social justice? It’s a million dollar
question.

One possible solution might be to get people to ride bicycles. Some 6 per
cent of all passenger-kilometres travelled in India in 1985 were on bicycles.
But efforts to increase this figure must overcome the fact that most of the
cyclists are poor and would ideally prefer something with an engine, while the
rich would consider it a matter of shame to be seen riding one. In such a
situation, good city planning is not possible unless the leadership, bureaucracy
and the public share a vision that is different from the Western urban
model.

The problems of urbanisation in the developing world are unlikely to be
solved without considerable technological innovation, management skill and, most
of all, the right kind of mind-set. For starters, urban managers in poor
countries can set themselves two objectives: environmental sustainability and
public participation. Natural resources must be used carefully and efficiently.
And the entire public should be involved in the planning and building of a
humane and green city. The public might be prepared to pay more if it knew the
nature of the challenge it faces.

TO MOST Indians, turmeric or haldi is a part of growing up, a magic
cure-all for the excesses of childhood. A classic “grandmother’s remedy”, the
virulent yellow powder or paste has been applied to the scrapes and cuts of
generations of children.

But last year in the US, two scientists were granted a patent to use this
plant extract in its powder form for healing wounds. The scientists claimed they
were the first to use turmeric (Curcuma longa) for this purpose. The
ensuing public outcry prompted the government in Delhi to file a case against
the American patent at the US Patent and Trademark Office in Washington DC this
week.

The furore has ramifications way beyond the use of turmeric. Indians see the
American patent as blatant “biopiracy”, yet another attempt by the West to
profit from their traditional knowledge. They are furious that foreign
scientists have been able to claim exclusive rights over a remedy that Indians
have known about for centuries.

Another Indian product, the Neem tree (Azadirachta indica),
traditionally used to make medicines and insecticides, has already been widely
exploited overseas. Between 1985 and 1995, over 37 patents were granted in
Europe and the US to use and develop neem products—largely as pesticides.
Most of these patents are held by big corporations, such as the pesticide
manufacturer Agridyne of the US. Only three are held by Indian companies.

The turmeric patent is the first to be challenged by India, and it has
attracted huge public interest. This is because of the “emotional attachment of
Indians to haldi,” says R. A. Mashelkar, director-general of the
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the government body responsible
for filing the case at the American patent office.

For the appeal to be upheld, India will have to prove that turmeric has been
previously used specifically to heal wounds. That proof must be in the form of
an academic paper which predates the patent application. The scientists holding
the American patent, Suman Das and Hari Har Cohly from the University of
Mississippi Medical Center, acknowledged in their application an article in the
Indian Journal of Medical Research in 1982 which stated that “turmeric
has long been used in India as a traditional medicine for treatment of various
sprains and inflammatory conditions”.

Claim to novelty

But they claimed that there was no research on the use of turmeric as a
healing agent for external wounds, and that therefore their application was
“novel”, an essential requirement for the granting of a patent. They said their
product would provide a simple and economical solution to the problem of chronic
external ulcers.

Indian officials, however, claim there is written evidence that turmeric has
been used for years to heal wounds. Mashelkar cites a study published in the
Journal of the Indian Medical Association in 1953, and says their legal
challenge includes many other research papers which will destroy the scientists’
claim to novelty.

Although the American patent would prevent Indian companies from marketing
turmeric for wound healing in the US, the government is mostly challenging the
patent on principle. The country is concerned about the increasing plundering of
its natural resources by foreign companies, and if it wins the turmeric case
there will inevitably be renewed calls for stronger “property rights” laws to
compensate poor countries for the traditional knowledge used by the West.

Mashelkar says the case is also important because it will establish the need
for a wider and more rigorous search for documentation before a patent on a
natural product is granted. He adds that India should record all its oral and
traditional knowledge in accessible databases to pre-empt future patent claims:
“The case on turmeric is a lesson for us to document our resources before it is
too late.”

Another government department already has this in hand. The All-India
Coordinated Research Project on Ethnobiology involves over 600 scientists and 27
institutions and has recorded over 17 000 uses of local plants in medicine.
However, officials are reluctant to publish until the country has a framework to
protect the interests of the local communities. They are worried that such
knowledge could be “hijacked” by foreign and domestic companies. P.
Pushpangadan, director of the Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute
(TBGRI) in Kerala and coordinator of the project, says: “The information we have
is so immense and so sensitive that publishing it will lead to misuse, unless we
have a clear strategy to protect the interests of the tribal community from whom
we have taken this knowledge. We must be able to give a share of the benefits to
the protectors.”

The UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity meets at least some of these
needs. The convention defines biological resources as national property rather
than common heritage for all humankind. But this definition has yet to be
incorporated into countries’ own legislation, and under patent laws biological
resources still constitute “common knowledge”.

Some campaigners believe the entire patent system should be overhauled.
Others believe individual countries should introduce the legislation needed to
protect traditional biological knowledge. The Indian Ministry of Environment and
Forests drafted a national biodiversity bill after ratifying the UN convention,
but it has been languishing in the corridors of government for three years.

Other countries are beginning to protect their natural products. A month ago,
there was a public outcry in Ecuador when the government tried to rush through
ratification of a bilateral intellectual property rights treaty which would have
made recognition of American patents obligatory in Ecuador. There had previously
been several cases of American companies trying to patent traditional medicines
and sacred plants that were widely available in Ecuador. The government
responded to the outcry by refusing to ratify the treaty, and last month it
passed a law which regulates the commercial exploitation of the country’s
biological resources and guarantees the ancestral rights of indigenous
communities to biodiversity and genetic resources.

The Philippines also has a law regulating bioprospecting, and campaigners say
India must do the same before its resources are further exploited. The TBGRI’s
attempts to ensure that the benefits of local resources are shared with local
people has set a promising precedent. The organisation has signed an agreement
to distribute royalties to tribal people whose knowledge it has used to develop
a new drug.

However, the apparent inability of Indian scientists to exploit the
commercial potential of the rich biodiversity which surrounds them has generated
much controversy within India. Many believe that the country should drop the
turmeric case and spend the ÂŁ200 000 it will cost to fight it on
developing its own system of protection instead. “The enemy is within,” says one
government scientist, who does not wish to be named. V. P. Sharma, director of
the Malaria Research Centre in Delhi, claims the granting of patents for neem
products to foreign companies was ultimately the fault of India’s own
scientists. “We have not protected the rights of our people over neem,” he
says.

Profit from plants

M. S. Swaminathan, an eminent agricultural scientist in Madras, agrees. “The
time has come for us to stop complaining about what others are doing,” he says.
“We should launch a national programme for using indigenous knowledge in the
modern scientific field.” P. M. Bhargava, former director of the Centre for
Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, complains that the government’s
Department of Biotechnology, which was set up to develop traditional Indian
medicine, “has failed to take any steps in this direction”. He argues that if
India carried out serious research it could discover over a thousand new drugs
which could make it a world leader in pharmaceuticals.

Yashpal, a physicist and former head of the government’s Department of
Science and Technology, believes there needs to be a change of attitudes within
India’s scientific community. “Our tragedy is that for us, indigenous is never
modern,” he says. “We have a derivative pharmaceuticals industry, with
foreign-based collaborations and know-how. Development is defined as a race to
catch up with what has been current abroad for a number of years.”

The urgent calls for India to protect its national biodiversity is a
reflection of just how lucrative is the search for biological resources, from
plants containing anticancer chemicals to new genes . Earlier this year, the
American government came under heavy criticism for patenting genetic material
from the Hagahai people, a small tribe in Papua New Guinea. The Hagahai carry a
cell line in their blood that is infected with a virus that can lead to
leukaemia; study of the cell line offers the possibility of a cure for the
cancer. The huge public outcry over the patent has made it difficult for any
company to exploit the cell line commercially.

But this case, and that of turmeric, highlight the flaws in the UN
biodiversity convention and the need for countries like India to protect the
plants in their own backyards.