Cereal offenders: Access and equity in trade negotiations on knowledge resources

This chapter considers the dynamics of trade negotiations in the 'knowledge economy', and the differences in cultural and economic interests that make these negotiations so strikingly contentious in relation to biological resources and associated knowledge. Divergent value systems lead to questioning of the legitimacy and equity of derivative or imitative innovation: Can innovation become an act of unfair competition? What bright line divides biopiracy from legitimate trade? In the negotiating coinage of 'knowledge diplomacy' (Ryan, 1998), innovation is offset against the protection of heritage and traditional values; concerns that imitative innovation may be a form of misappropriation can lead to the withdrawal of 'knowledge resources' from the 'common heritage' or from a contested 'public domain' to become a 'form of national property' (Kloppenburg, 1988) or a protected collective commons. Rifkin (2001) ponders the emergence of an 'economy of granters of access' - but the conditions of access can be determined by new or established notions of property right, as the contours and boundary of the common heritage and public domain mutate under the pressure of traderelated negotiations. What are at stake are the terms of access to technological knowledge (whether traditional or high-tech), genetic resources (GR), traditional methods and product descriptions, descriptive or evocative language and cultural expressions - in short, access to knowledge resources, the feedstocks of the knowledge economy. These questions are explored by contrasting multilateral negotiations over GR with bilateral negotiations on trade in wine. The World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement is symbolic of a general reassessment of national 'capital', but the 'new' economy is not necessarily seen as an idealized, technologically advanced economy. GR and related traditional knowledge (TK) are 'enclosed' because of their perceived value, or through fear of others unfairly appropriating their value: increasingly, claims of unfair competition and illegitimate trade barriers in agriculture will be intertwined with the debate about access to GR and the fading ideal of common heritage. Negotiators addressing trade in knowledge are dealing with the tension between the non-rivalrous quality of knowledge resources and the instinct to enclose, to appropriate its value that was notably articulated by Brand (1987): '[I]nformation wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, "intellectual property", the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.'