Package Deal Du Jour: Biopiracy

[Meta Blog]

Originally from Gus Van Horn,

I found this TCS Daily article on an environmentalist conference recently held in Brazil notable for bringing to my attention an interesting example of a package deal called "biopiracy".

Let us first review just what, exactly, a package deal is. From a footnote by Leonard Peikoff to Ayn Rand's essay "The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made", in Philosophy: Who Needs It:

"Package-dealing" is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or "package," elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance, or value.

Ayn Rand elaborates further in "How to Read (and Not to Write)" in The Ayn Rand Letter (I,26,3). "[Package-dealing employs] the shabby old gimmick of equating opposites by substituting nonessentials for their essential characteristics."

The article does not itself attempt to give a concise definition of "biopiracy", so I use this one, from Word Spy:

The patenting of plants, genes, and other biological products that are indigenous to a foreign country.

Uh. But isn't every country "foreign" to some other country? And while the "bio-" makes sense, why is technological innovation -- even if it consists only of discovering a hitherto unknown, naturally-occurring value "piracy"? Why not "biodiscovery"? Or "bioinnovation"? Or "biodevelopment"?

The article provides our answer, by using the term in its full intellectual context:

Today's version is the cargo cult is that forests and jungles of the developing world hold bounteous lodes of "Green Gold" - the genetic resources of the Earth: wondrous plants, insects, snakes and barks that traditional peoples for thousands of years have used to cure illness and fend off starvation.

Their right [sic]to this cargo is threatened by "biopiracy". This is a political term which means that foreigners (mainly multinational companies, of course) obtain these products (even buy them in the local market), take them away and create blockbuster drugs that earn billions.

To stop this "biopiracy" governments in Africa and Latin America, including Brazil, and India propose an international treaty which will "improve access" (i.e. stop foreigners) to these genetic resource and increase benefits (by holding up patents and other intellectual property if any shard of a genetic resource is used in any product patented), until they get their fair share. [bold added]

In other words, the natural biological resources of countries "foreign" to developed nations (i.e., the nations having the wherewithal to unlock the potential of these resources) are "pirated" if some innovator from the developed world has the temerity to develop said resources without cutting some local cheiftain or junta part of the profit.

This is a classic example of a package deal. Here, a particular type of innovation (bioscientific discovery) and a particular type of crime (piracy) are treated as if they are part of a coherent whole. The opposite notions of (1) the intellectual property of the scientists and (2) the stolen loot of a third world kleptocracy are treated as if they are the same thing. This is done by causing the reader to focus on nonessentials: where the scientist and his subject matter came from, the value of his discovery, and the poverty of the people who sat around the very same tropical plant for years without taking any interest in it whatsoever, for example.

As with any fallacy, the goal is to avoid having to make an argument. The goal here is clearly to use multiculturalism as a means of getting Western countries to simply hand over the values produced by their scientists to the governments of the third world. This means: to violate the property rights of their scientists. This is why, as the article rightly points out, if this idea is allowed to wreck intellectual property law, innovation in this area will grind to a halt and the natural biological resources of the third world will remain underutilized.