I just read this article about the Plumpy’nut patent debate.
Plumpy’nut is a peanut based food product designed to feed starving children in emergency situations. The product has turned out to be revolutionary and has changed the face of feeding the hungry.
However, Plumpy’nut is protected by patent, and one company provides 90% of the world’s supply.
One side argues that this is necessary to keep America- with it’s huge government subsidized surplus peanut supply- from flooding the market. Right now the company that produces Plumpy’nut works with local suppliers in Africa to produce the product using locally grown produce. This leads to jobs, increased independence, a better understanding of the local market, etc. This aspect makes it a model sustainable development program.
The other side argues that it really is a simple product consisting of peanut butter, vegetable oil, powdered milk and vitamins. They argue that allowing competing products would allow more hungry children access to this important product. Right now only 5% of malnourished children have access to Plumpy’nut. It would seem like increasing supplies would greatly benefit many children.
There is a bad side to flooding the market with food for starving people? I don’t see what it would be. Is there not enough starvation in this world that we can afford to ignore a huge surplus of the raw materal to make this wonder food?
The argument, which I’m offering without comment, is that allowing the US to flood the market would cause local, African producers to be unable to compete in production. The patentholders, who are French, consider local production to be a goal inherently worth pursuing.
I understand the “give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish” argument, but do the millions of malnourshed people in this world have enough time to plant, cultivate and harvest local crops for processing before they die of starvation, and what about natural disasters like drought or famine where crops are planted and fail to grow.
I’m against it being a patent. I know it might suck for those peanut farmers in Africa who may lose their jobs, but it sucks even worse right now for the people starving to death who aren’t getting food. Surely there are other ways to bring jobs to Africa besides this one thing.
I know this is going to sound harsh, but I think it’s ridiculous to encourage population growth in areas that are incapable of sustaining it. The French have the right idea - produce it locally - that way the population can’t grow beyond what the local resources are capable of supporting.
Assuming without deciding that the patent could or should be cancelled simply because it would be a good thing for hungry people, with no downside… that isn’t the case. The patent holders are trying (or claimng, anyway) to break the cycle of African dependence on imported food to survive. Suely that’s a worthy motive, and surely if there’s a difference of opinion on the possibility or usefulness of that, it still no longer is a case of “no downside.”
So I’d say the patent should stand, at least on this argument.
I think the answer to that, which may also sound harsh but I think is less harsh then letting people starve, is to tie access to food aid with use of birth control.
Isn’t the entire purpose of a patent to incentivize innovation? I don’t see how protecting a glorified food recipe with a handful of ingredients, none of which are original, serves that purpose.
It seems like mixing peanut butter, powdered milk, and vitamins is way too obvious of an idea to be considered an “invention.”
The patent is not for the exact recipe, but rather “for the production of nutritional paste-type foods”. More specifically:
“The invention concerns a complete food or nutritional supplement containing at most 10% of water by weight, preferably at most 5% of water, and more preferably at most 2% of water, with low osmolality, oxidation-stable, comprising a mixture of quality food products, said mixture being coated by at least a substance rich in lipids derived optionally from oleaginous seeds.”
Now if you should be able to patent something like that is a whole different debate, and in fact at least two companies are challenging it for being too broad.
I’d like to point out that in sustenance farming situations, having more children is a sound investment and a large family increases the standard of living for everyone.
Children act as valuable farm labor, produce and sell small household goods, earn income from informal work around the neighborhood, herd animal and generally make the household more productive. Furthermore, in a sustenance farming situation your children are your only hope for living a decent life in your old. To not have children or to have just a few would be as monumentally stupid as not putting a cent towards your retirement or putting your entire retirement fund into one stock. You are not going to convince sustenance farmers to have fewer children because that would be economic disaster for the entire family.
Once you get into urban areas, of course, children start costing money as they need expensive schooling and the like but do not contribute to household finances. Sensibly, around the world and in every society (including our own) we stop having so many kids a generation or two after moving to the city.
Not to pick on you in particular, Blalron, and I mean no offense, but if the patent were as simplistic as your characterization of it, it wouldn’t have been granted in the first place. It’s a common misconception that patents are granted to cover broadly obvious ideas, when in fact they’re generally much more nuanced than that.
For example, the US patent that covers Plumpy’Nut is US Patent No. 6,346,284 (this is one patent that covers it, anyway; I don’t know if it’s the only one). The first claim of that patent, which defines the invention, reads as follows:
So you can see that it’s not just “mixing peanut butter, powdered milk, and vitamins.” There is a laundry list of requirements that a product has to meet before it can be found to infringe the patent. For example, if I create a product that is very similar, but has a different water weight percentage or a different osmolality, then I won’t directly infringe the patent and I can sell my competing product freely (ignoring, for the moment, a claim of infringement under the doctrine of equivalents).
On the other hand, if it can be shown that anyone has prepared a mixture with the claimed properties before the Plumpy’Nut people applied for their patent (November 19, 1998, according to the US patent) or that it would have been obvious before that time to do so, then the patent can be invalidated. There’s a legal process for doing that and it sounds as if a couple of different parties are pursuing that.
Now, I don’t know the specifics of the cases, so I can’t say whether any of the legal challenges will be successful. I will note, however, that one factor in Plumpy’Nut’s favor is that, apparently, it was a breakthrough product when it was introduced - nobody had done it before, which makes it hard, IMO, to argue that it was an obvious combination. If it was that obvious, why didn’t somebody fill that gap earlier than Plumpy’Nut did?
As for the question of whether it’s moral to allow a patent on a product that saves lives, thus allowing the patentee to limit the availability of that product, well, that’s hardly a new argument. It’s the same tension that has existed for ages in the pharmaceutical industry. And so far, the pharmaceutical companies seem to winning that battle. I’d expect the Plumpy’Nut battle to shake out along similar lines. And I don’t have a problem with that. All patents are open to legal challenges; if they win, they deserve the right to enforce their patent as a reward for their innovation.
To circle back to my original point, though: patents very rarely have a scope as broad as a newspaper article about them might make it seem and, even then, the question of obviousness needs to be determined as of the time the patent was filed, not the current timeframe.
It puts local farmers out of business, so that there is less local food available, and the area is then permanently dependent on outside food.
If the US stops sending food after all the local farmers are gone, and the land lies fallow, then even more people can end up starving.
If it’s so obvious, then why didn’t anyone think of it before?
“A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.” United States Patent 6368227