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Pesticides and the Patent Bargain

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Abstract

In order to enlarge the pool of knowledge available in the public domain, temporary exclusive rights (i.e. patents) are granted to innovators who are willing to fully disclose the information needed to reproduce their invention. After the 20-year patent protection period elapses, society should be able to make free use of the publicly available knowledge described in the patent document, which is deemed useful. Resistance to pesticides destroys however the usefulness of information listed in patent documents over time. The invention, here pesticides, will have a decreased effectiveness once it enters the public domain. In some cases pesticides lose most of their efficacy shortly after temporary exclusive rights expire. Society’s share of the patent bargain—having new useful knowledge available in the public domain—is lost. Resistance can be slowed down, if pesticide use is limited by optimal compliance. Stimulating proper use is generally not compatible with existing market incentives for patent holders, since these have to be able to maximize profits in order to recoup research and development costs and satisfy obligations to the company’s stakeholders. Another incentive system is needed to ensure longevity of pesticides, which at the same time does not hamper future research.

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Notes

  1. See Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), hereinafter UDHR, art. 27.2, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), hereinafter ICESCR, art. 15.1(c) and UN Committee (2006).

  2. E.g. The Patent Lens (www.lens.org), see Jefferson et al. (2013).

  3. In the words of Böhme et al. (1976): “… it is precisely the repetition of the experiment that has invalidated the proposition that DDT is an insecticide since its being repeated has led to the selection of resistant insect strains.”.

  4. Without going into the philosophical complexities related to future generations (cf. Gosseries and Meyer 2009), I will take for granted that: (1) society has a general interest in future generations to exist (in procreation) and (2) if the present generation decides to procreate it should not make for future generations the enjoyment of a good life more difficult than it is for the present generation.

  5. Between 20 and 40 % of crops are currently lost due to pests and diseases, see Popp et al. (2013).

  6. This refers here to the case where people do not know if they are members of the generation that exchanged the resource for a set of benefits or are offspring of the generation who already consumed whatever benefits received in exchange.

  7. On the related case, Orzech and Nichter (2008) note that “Antibiotics are not a “global public good” because they are privately developed, manufactured, sold, and managed according to the profit motives of pharmaceutical companies.”

  8. As an objection, it is often claimed that pesticides would not have been developed if exclusive rights were not enforced to secure sufficient returns for those who develop them. We cannot deprive the poor from something that would actually not exist without exclusive rights. This claim is not necessarily true. Many important inventions were developed without making use of exclusive rights (e.g. for antibiotics see Quinn (2013)). At the most one could argue that some pesticides would have been developed at a later stage.

  9. We can read in the transcript of a drafting session held November 1948: “The Australian delegation would be unable to accept the USSR amendment which subordinated scientific research to a political principle [i.e. the promotion of peace]; the sole aim of science could only be the quest for truth…” (United Nations 1948b). The reluctance to follow a political principle is easier to understand after contrasting it with the perspective of the Peruvian delegation “… not only must the right of every person to take part in the cultural, artistic and scientific life of the community be recognized, but also the right to do so in that complete freedom without which there could he no creation worthy of man”, thereafter recalling the harmful political pressures to scientists in recent history (United Nations 1948a).

  10. Again, relying on the literature on antibiotics, an overview of different strategies to combat resistance is offered by Outterson (2014).

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Acknowledgments

This article is in part result of a research project of the Centre for Society and the Life Sciences in The Netherlands, funded by the Netherlands Genomics Initiative, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. I greatly benefited from discussions with Henk van den Belt and comments made by the participants of the First International Conference of the Asia-Pacific Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics in Bangkok and the anonymous reviewers for the elaboration of this paper.

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  1. Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O. Box 653, 84105, Beer Sheva, Israel

    Cristian Timmermann

  2. Philosophy Group, Wageningen University, Hollandseweg 1, 6706 KN, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Cristian Timmermann

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Timmermann, C. Pesticides and the Patent Bargain. J Agric Environ Ethics 28, 1–19 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-014-9515-x

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