TRIPs and Its Consequences for Developing Nations

When the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights – commonly known as TRIPs – came into force in 1995 under the World Trade Organization (WTO), it marked a turning point in global trade. For the first time, intellectual property rules were woven directly into the multilateral trading system. Developed countries, led by powerful pharmaceutical and technology corporations, championed the agreement as a way to protect innovation worldwide. But for countries in the Global South, TRIPs introduced a new set of burdens: soaring medicine prices, threats to agricultural sovereignty, and the erosion of indigenous knowledge. Understanding what TRIPs actually means for developing nations requires looking beyond the agreement’s stated goals and into its real-world consequences.

What TRIPs actually requires
The patent ownership gap between North and South
Access to medicines: a health crisis with legal roots
Compulsory licensing and the Doha Declaration
Agriculture, seeds, and the control of food systems
Indigenous knowledge and biopiracy
The structural gap in TRIPs: Article 27 and disclosure requirements
TRIPs and the stifling of industrial development in the South
Reforming TRIPs: what would a fairer system look like?

What TRIPs actually requires

TRIPs introduced intellectual property law into the multilateral trading system for the first time and remains the most comprehensive multilateral agreement on intellectual property to date. All WTO member states are obligated to provide patent protection across all fields of technology – including pharmaceuticals, agricultural inputs, and biological processes – for a minimum of 20 years. Countries cannot discriminate between technology sectors in their patent regimes, nor can they treat imported and locally produced goods differently. In practice, this means developing countries must enforce the same intellectual property standards as wealthy, industrialized nations, regardless of their vastly different economic capacities and development needs.

What makes this particularly significant is how the agreement came to be. The drafts for the Uruguay Round negotiations came not from the countries at the table, but from lobbying coalitions of key Global North firms such as DuPont, Monsanto, and Pfizer, which pushed to expand the concept of intellectual property so that the final product itself – not just the process of making it – would be patentable. This shift locked Southern countries into paying royalties to Northern patent holders regardless of how a product was independently developed or manufactured.

The patent ownership gap between North and South

One of the starkest realities of the TRIPs era is who actually holds patents. Countries and corporations in the Global North continue to own intellectual property patents on key products – including pharmaceuticals, digital technologies, and agricultural goods – locking the South into indefinite patent payment regimes. This is not simply a matter of innovation capacity. It reflects a structural imbalance in which developing countries, rich in biological diversity and traditional knowledge, are net importers of patented products and net payers of licensing fees.

Enforcing the same level of patent protection for developed and developing countries leads to higher proportional costs for developing countries, reinforcing existing power imbalances and widening the gap in innovation capacity between rich and poor nations. The World Bank has noted that TRIPs has not led to a demonstrable acceleration of investment to low-income countries – a benefit that was specifically promised during the agreement’s formation. For many in the South, TRIPs has functioned less as a ladder for development and more as a mechanism transferring wealth upward – from poor countries to patent holders in wealthy ones.

Access to medicines: a health crisis with legal roots

Perhaps the most immediately life-threatening consequence of TRIPs has been its effect on access to essential medicines in the developing world. Before TRIPs, countries like India could manufacture and export high-quality generic versions of patented drugs at a fraction of the cost charged by multinational pharmaceutical companies. This supply of affordable generics was a lifeline for countries with limited health budgets, particularly across Africa.

As countries comply with the TRIPs Agreement, they are no longer able to produce and export cheap generic copies of patented medicines. For nations that lack both domestic manufacturing capacity and the financial resources to purchase patented drugs at market price, this creates a devastating gap. Developing countries are being asked to adopt strong patent protection at much lower income levels than developed countries did when they established their own patent regimes – a double standard that critics argue is both economically unjust and ethically indefensible.

The HIV/AIDS crisis brought this conflict into sharp relief. With more than 30 million people living with HIV, most of them in the poorest regions of the world, the need to address the problem of access to patented medicines emerged as a global priority. Countries like Brazil, South Africa, and Thailand issued compulsory licenses – legal mechanisms that allow governments to override a patent for public health reasons – to produce or import cheaper antiretroviral drugs. They were met with fierce resistance from pharmaceutical companies and from the governments of wealthy countries that backed them.

Compulsory licensing and the Doha Declaration

The tension between public health and patent enforcement came to a head at the 2001 WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar. Developing nations successfully pushed for a declaration affirming that the TRIPs Agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health, including through compulsory licensing and parallel importation of medicines. This was a significant legal clarification, but it did not fully resolve the problem.

A significant obstacle remained: many developing countries have not incorporated TRIPs flexibilities – such as compulsory licensing and parallel importation – into their legislation to the extent authorized under Doha. This is largely because most low-income countries lack the legal and technical expertise to draft such legislation independently. Many have ended up copying intellectual property laws directly from developed countries, often implementing protections that are even stronger than TRIPs requires – to their own detriment. The result is that flexibilities that exist on paper are frequently unavailable in practice.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed these same fault lines again. At the WTO, developed country governments repeatedly blocked attempts by India, South Africa, and other developing countries for suspension of patents for COVID-19 vaccines and related treatments. Over 100 developing nations supported a waiver, but it was blocked by G7 members and condemned by hundreds of civil society organizations including Médecins Sans Frontières.

Agriculture, seeds, and the control of food systems

TRIPs does not confine its reach to medicines. Its provisions on plant variety protection and biotechnology patents have profound implications for agriculture in the developing world – where farming is often the primary economic activity and food security remains a daily concern.

Under TRIPs, plant varieties must be protected either through patents or through a specialized legal regime. This has opened the door for large agribusinesses to claim exclusive rights over seeds and farming technologies. Article 27.3(b) of TRIPs allows governments to exclude certain plant and animal inventions from patenting, but plant varieties must still be eligible for some form of intellectual property protection – giving corporations a legal pathway to monopolize the genetic materials on which smallholder farmers depend.

The Basmati rice controversy is a telling example. When a US company attempted to patent Basmati rice varieties – a staple crop with centuries of cultivation history in South Asia – India and Pakistan were forced into lengthy legal battles to contest those claims. The case demonstrates biopiracy, where patents on traditional varieties represent a significant threat to the traditional exports of developing nations. For millions of farmers in South Asia, the commodification of their agricultural heritage is not an abstract legal dispute – it is an existential economic threat.

Indigenous knowledge and biopiracy

Among the deepest injustices associated with TRIPs is what it does – and fails to do – about indigenous knowledge. Communities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America have developed, over centuries, sophisticated systems of knowledge about medicinal plants, farming techniques, and ecological management. This knowledge has real commercial value. Yet under TRIPs, it is largely unprotected.

Under exclusivity provisions, intellectual property rights owners may prevent local communities from legally using their own indigenous knowledge once a corporation has obtained a patent on a formulation derived from that knowledge. Intellectual property rights, especially patents, have been criticized by indigenous peoples and pro-Third World advocacy groups because they are seen to encourage and legitimize biopiracy – the unauthorized commercial exploitation of their knowledge and biological resources.

India’s experience is illustrative. Foreign companies attempted to patent the medicinal uses of turmeric and neem – plants whose properties were documented in ancient Indian texts and used in traditional healing for thousands of years. India successfully challenged the turmeric patent at the US Patent Office by presenting prior art evidence. To prevent recurrence, the Indian government launched the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), cataloguing ancient medical knowledge in patent-compatible formats. This was a defensive measure born of necessity, not choice – a country forced to protect its own heritage from being claimed by others under a legal system it had little hand in designing.

When TRIPs was forced on countries during the Uruguay Round, many issues of public concern were bypassed, and the full ethical, ecological and economic implications of patenting life were not discussed. Third World countries were coerced into accepting that Western-style intellectual property rights systems were “strong” and “advanced” – yet these systems were strong at establishing corporate monopolies while weak at protecting indigenous knowledge.

The structural gap in TRIPs: Article 27 and disclosure requirements

Article 27 of TRIPs permits member states to issue patents for microorganisms and biotechnological processes, but it does not require them to reveal the provenance of the biological materials or traditional knowledge used in those inventions. This ambiguity is a critical loophole. A corporation can obtain a patent on a product derived from indigenous knowledge without acknowledging – or compensating – the communities who developed that knowledge over generations.

A coalition of developing countries led by Brazil and India has proposed amending TRIPs to require patent applicants to disclose the country of origin of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, along with evidence of prior informed consent and fair benefit-sharing. This proposal has been supported by the African group and many other developing countries, but has faced persistent resistance from developed nations reluctant to impose additional burdens on their patent applicants. In May 2024, WIPO adopted the GRATK Treaty – the first international agreement mandating disclosure for patents derived from traditional or genetic resources – but it is not yet in force.

TRIPs and the stifling of industrial development in the South

Beyond medicines and agriculture, TRIPs has broader implications for the technological and industrial development of low-income countries. Historically, today’s wealthy nations built their industrial bases partly through practices that TRIPs now prohibits – copying foreign technologies, reverse engineering products, and building domestic industries behind protectionist walls before opening up to international competition. South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan all leveraged weak intellectual property enforcement as part of their development strategies in earlier decades.

Key innovations in battery systems, solar panels, and wind turbines are protected by patents held largely by Global North firms, making technology transfer difficult or impossible. As a result, developing countries seeking to transition to clean energy must pay licensing fees to adopt technologies they urgently need – adding cost to the very development pathways that global sustainable development goals demand they pursue.

Deeply ingrained power imbalances reinforce and widen the gap in innovation capacity between rich and poor countries, contributing to global inequalities. TRIPs, by insisting on uniformity of intellectual property protections regardless of a country’s level of development, effectively uses one-size-fits-all rules in a deeply unequal world – with predictable results for those at the bottom of the global economic hierarchy.

Reforming TRIPs: what would a fairer system look like?

Calls for TRIPs reform have grown steadily since the agreement entered into force. Developing countries have consistently argued for greater flexibility in implementing intellectual property rules, more robust protection of traditional knowledge, mandatory disclosure requirements for patents using biological resources, and broader rights to issue compulsory licenses in public health emergencies. Developing countries should implement TRIPs recognizing that its provisions do not demand the excessive levels of protection promoted by only a few OECD countries – and that meeting public health needs requires both policy flexibility and meaningful external support.

The Doha Declaration was a step forward, but its implementation has been uneven and its protections inadequate. The 2022 WIPO GRATK Treaty represents another incremental advance on indigenous knowledge, but systemic reform of TRIPs itself – particularly around the rights of developing countries to pursue their own development pathways – remains elusive. What is clear is that a global intellectual property regime designed largely by and for wealthy country corporations cannot be neutral in its effects on the world’s poorest nations.

What do you think? Should international trade agreements like TRIPs be restructured to allow developing countries to set their own intellectual property standards based on their level of development? And given that indigenous communities created the knowledge that corporations now patent for profit, what would genuine justice look like in reforming global biopiracy protections?

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Table of Contents

What TRIPs actually requires 🔗

The patent ownership gap between North and South 🔗

Access to medicines: a health crisis with legal roots 🔗

Compulsory licensing and the Doha Declaration 🔗

Agriculture, seeds, and the control of food systems 🔗

Indigenous knowledge and biopiracy 🔗

The structural gap in TRIPs: Article 27 and disclosure requirements 🔗

TRIPs and the stifling of industrial development in the South 🔗

Reforming TRIPs: what would a fairer system look like? 🔗