The relationship between trade and the existing patents regime has also resulted in the benefits of advances in such spheres as health and agriculture, being skewed in favour of the corporate sector at the expense of the public, with especially adverse consequences for people in developing countries. The basic rationale for an intellectual property rights regime in the sphere of health and agriculture is to provide an incentive for and protection of investments in research and development.
But there is a strong case that the current system overemphasizes incentives and protection for the entrepreneur at the expense of the public. In the sphere of health products, the logic of the market leads to investments in those medical conditions for which there is a market among the more affluent, primarily in developed countries. As a result, an overwhelming proportion of investments and patents in the health industry ignore life-threatening diseases that afflict the majority of people in the developing world. According to a recent World Health Organization (WHO) report, less than 10 per cent of the current estimated expenditure on medical research has gone into diseases that affected 90 per cent of the world's population. A recent study concluded that of the 1,223 new drugs patented between 1975 and 1997, only 13 were for tropical diseases and only four of those could be regarded as new drugs suitable for humans. And where treatments are available, such as for human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), they are too expensive to be afforded by those, increasingly women in Africa and parts of Asia, most affected by it.
In the case of improvements on existing products, especially traditional products, goods that were once in the public domain and easily accessible, ranging from seeds and traditional medicine to knowledge and culture, are being appropriated privately as a result of the patents regime. The rules that prevail protect the corporate innovator at the expense of traditional producers and users. There is also a case to establish a more balanced property rights regime that would protect and reward traditional knowledge by requiring companies that make use of such knowledge to pay royalties on their profits.