THE VIENNA TECHNOLOGY FORUMS

Image Gallery The United Nations Conference of Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD) proved generally unresponsive to the needs of the world's poor nations.

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MOTHER's own Copthorne Macdonald recently returned from an extended European trip. During his travels, he attended the U.N. Conference of Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD) in Vienna . . . the Non-Governmental Organizations Forum (NGO Forum) held in the same city . . . and Britain's Community Technology Festival (COMTEK). The following article is the first of a series of reports from Cop on these attempts to determine how technology (both hard and soft) can best meet the needs of the world's people.

Just imagine for a moment that you're a government official in a poor land ... a country where many babies don't live to see their first birthday. Given the opportunity, you'd certainly be willing to make a deal with a multinational corporation to have that firm build a pharmaceutical plant in your nation ... especially if the company agreed to limit the plant's profits to a reasonable level above its costs. After all, such an arrangement would provide your people with a reliable supply of inexpensive drugs ... which might help save some of those children from dying, right?

Wrong! You see, the "fine print" in the arrangement says that the "raw" chemicals used by the pharmaceutical plant must be purchased from other companies owned by the same corporation. Now you might have thought the stipulation unimportant during the negotiations, but the truth of the matter is that the supplier firms will probably charge up to 1,000% more than the open market price for the raw materials ... so the finished medicines won't be inexpensive at all!

Unfortunately, this example isn't some far-fetched, barely possible scenario. It's an only slightly modified case history of one of the many rip-offs perpetrated against developing countries by multinational corporations. It was in the hope of eliminating at least a portion of just such injustices-and, in effect, of getting a technological "fair deal" from the rich lands that are the home base for most international corporations-that representatives of 120 have-not nations banded together at the U.N. Conference of Science and Technology for Development.

SMALL CONCESSIONS (OR NONE AT ALL)

Although the United States (as well as many other developed countries) claims to be perfectly willing to share its technology with poor nations, the fact is that-in western lands, at least-the governments don't often own much technology. Instead, such knowledge is usually in the hands of large corporations . . . and is only sold by the firms at their price and on their terms.

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