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Thank you, thank you very much, Thomas, and good morning everybody.
Here we go
Look, today I’d like to talk to you all about a pressing challenge.
2009 was the first year in which we saw over one billion people
moving to areas of chronic hunger, malnutrition, and poverty.
That’s one-sixth of... almost one-sixth the human...
of the population which doesn’t have access to science and technology.
Now... the benefits of science and technology.
Now, a lot of this malnutrition is actually preventable.
This is the official causes of deaths of children in these areas.
And if you look at neonatal causes, diarrhea, malaria,
some of these areas, there’s actually a lot of science and technology available
that can prevent that.
A good example is what they call the Plumpy Nut.
This is a project that was instituted in 2006 between... with the company called Nutriset.
Plumpy Nut was a thing which would actually take nut based technology,
add milk, add some glucose, add some micronutrients,
and we’ll actually help children like this.
The interesting thing is before they had Plumpy Nut
they would only reach ten percent
of the malnourished children in the Ethiopian highland, the royal highlands.
After Plumpy Nut, they are reaching 70 percent.
And now this is all existing technology
which if unlocked could actually make a huge difference.
This was actually done with a lot of the food industries.
So our idea is to actually look at this, the patented world.
There are 5.6 million patents enforced at the moment
and if you know anything about the patent space, patents...
to be a temporary monopoly to reward invention.
The problem is that those patents actually also sometimes prevent access
to benefits for developing communities.
In what way... we think the challenges...
there’s three users for knowledge.
There’s a commercial users at the top,
that might be the two billion people in the developed world.
There’s the emerging market users,
so the folks in India or China, the three billion there.
But there’s a space down the bottom, the humanitarian users.
These users... and this is what our idea,
the whole idea of global responsibility licensing is about.
Global responsibility licensing is about unlocking the knowledge
in this bottom area, the one billion people.
Well, not.. well, making sure we’re maintaining the competitiveness
of companies and... for the commercial and emerging market users.
At the heart of this idea is not just global responsibility licensing
but a global responsibility license.
This is made to look modular.
By the way, it’s very hard to find a word for that... picture for that.
Modular licenses, a license, it’s a standard patent license
which defines what these humanitarian users are
and actually creates terms which companies can start to feel comfortable about.
Both terms can include things like geographical spreads,
so here’s the list about triggers for the least developed countries,
many of which don’t have strong patent... in the first place
so you’re not actually losing anything.
Or it could also include developing countries or it might be the whole of world.
Now, what gets really interesting is the effort...
if you start looking at the users side of this and when we define humanitarian users
we look at things like subsistence,
so this is for people’s own use not... to a marketplace.
We look at development or disaster recovery
and we look at development users for those under a dollar a day,
any under a dollar a day.
And you can see from a commercial perspective
there is no market for those areas.
Now, what we’re trying to do at the moment
is trying to get a coalition of the NGO community
and we actually have concern worldwide.
One of the co-founders’ idea, Shivon
who’s actually not here coz she’s actually doing a whole lot of work with Haiti,
and... concern want to engage and pre the initiative with a whole lot of other NGOs.
We’re also looking at a key stakeholder which is the business community
because the owners of IP we think we’ve got the nice...
a nice sort of balance between commercial needs and global responsibility,
and so we’ve... to talk with businesses or other large holders of IP
and to ways in which we might be able to help them assert their global responsibility.
We’re also talking very much with the science community.
I worked for the National Research Agency in Australia
and we’re actually also the largest IP holder in Australia as well.
We’re members of, I think, called the Global Research Alliance,
and the Global Research Alliance is a part for this initiative now.
They employ 80,000 researchers around the world or...
that we think could actually help to get these benefits.
And finally, it’s about bringing it all together
which is with the legal community
and we’re working with organizations such as WIPO,
the Creative Commons, the Licensing Executive Society.
And I should say the Baker and McKenzie, the global law firm,
has been giving us all the pro bono legal support for this initiative.
Because what we’re really trying to do is get that right balance
between all of those four different constituencies,
the science, the business, the NGO... and the legal community.
I should say just finally and Thomas mentioned this early,
this is actually an initiative of the Young Global Leaders,
a firm of young global leaders and we think it’s really important that we...
that the World Economic Forum is a great place
that can actually convene some thoughts behind this
and I look forward to discussing it with you later.