TECHNOLOGY-BRAZIL: New Strategies to Overcome Foreign Dependence

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 21 2001 (IPS) - Most of the patents registered in Brazil belong to foreign companies, a clear indication of the country’s level of technological dependence, which a conference this week made efforts to overcome.

Just three percent of the more than 4,000 applications for biotechnology patents received by the National Institute of Industrial Property from 1995 to 2000 were filed by Brazilians, although most of the research was based on the country’s rich biodiversity.

To change that situation, the government organised a National Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation, which drew officials, researchers and business representatives to Brasilia Tuesday through Friday, where they charted the course to be taken over the coming decade.

The conference launched a debate on a new law that would grant incentives for innovative research. It also approved new financing, which will expand the resources available for technological research and development (R&D) in agribusiness, aeronautics, biotechnology and health.

Brazil will thus have 14 funds next year for financing R&D – a mechanism that already led last year to a twofold rise in Brazilian investment in R&D in technology with respect to 1999, underlined President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

The new legislation and funding will inaugurate a “new phase” more favourable to innovation, by facilitating partnerships between universities and companies, which in turn will lead to a reduction in purchases of foreign technology, said Minister of Science and Technology Ronaldo Sardenberg.

The amount earmarked by Brazil for science and technology is similar to that assigned by other large developing countries like China, India and South Korea. However, the number of patents generated by this country is much lower than the number registered in South Korea, for example.

South Korea has carefully planned its efforts, and has concentrated investment almost exclusively in technology, adapting and perfecting products made in other countries, and in its companies, while Brazil has focused on basic science in the national universities, Sardenberg pointed out.

Companies account for 40 percent of spending on R&D in Brazil, compared to 67 percent in the United States.

Brazil’s biggest problem is the virtual monopoly enjoyed by universities in science and technology, said physicist and former education minister José Goldemberg, who pointed out that the contrary is true in South Korea, where industry plays the leading role in investment in R&D, which – he said – favours innovation and benefits society as a whole.

In consequence, Brazil appeared 43rd on a list of 72 countries ranked by the United Nations according to R&D expenditure – even below countries that are much smaller and poorer, like the Caribbean island nation Trinidad and Tobago.

Cardoso underlined that Brazil’s universities currently train around 6,000 doctors a year, six times more than in 1993, and that the articles published by Brazilian scientists in academic journals already represent four percent of the world total, and are growing three times faster than the international average.

Brazilian researchers took the world by surprise, for example, with their leap forward in genetic research, deciphering the genomes of bacteria that are important to agriculture, and contributing to the understanding of human DNA. In fact, Brazil has begun to catch up to the United States and Britain, the global leaders in that area of research.

The challenge now is to convert that scientific progress into technology and innovations that are put to use by companies, said Sardenberg.

In the past, Brazilian companies did not develop their own technologies because the national market was closed and protected, the minister noted.

But the liberalisation of the market in the 1990s forced them to compete with imported goods, and investment in R&D became indispensable to their survival, he added.

The scant number of patents registered in Brazil is also due to the fact that Brazilian scientists and companies have not seen protecting their research and innovations as a priority issue, said the president of the National Institute of Industrial Property, José Graça Aranha.

The international patent system which Brazil and other countries would like to see modified favours rich nations that already possess high-tech knowhow – a trend that is especially clear in the area of biotechnology, participants at the conference complained.

The immense majority of products developed from plants and microorganisms are patented by countries in the industrialised North, which thus have a corner on a global market estimated at an annual 500 to 800 billion dollars.

Few crumbs are left for the developing nations that possess the lion’s share of the world’s biodiversity and the traditional knowledge on which many biotechnology products are based, said participants.