Foreign investment

The pharmaceutical generics sector is estimated to invest in Malta almost Lm57.5 million in fixed capital by the year 2007.

Such an investment should employ almost 800 people (compare this to the 420 persons employed by this sector in 2003) and their salaries in 2007 are estimated to correspond to an expenditure of almost Lm6.5 million. This, of course, is quite a substantial investment.

Unfortunately, there is a catch. It turns out that generic pharmaceutical manufacturers are being lured to Malta on account of Malta's patent regime, which is strongly characterised by Malta's non-accession to both the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and the European Patent Convention (EPC). Since Malta is not party to these international patent registration systems, the innovative drug makers tend to overlook our country when it comes to patenting their new medicines - thereby making of Malta a haven that is largely devoid of patent restrictions. In other words, the generic pharmaceutical manufacturers can, in Malta, replicate medicines which are patented in almost every other corner of the world with impunity, thanks to our insular and isolated patent legislation.

But in this grand foreign investment strategy, what we have tragically overlooked is that Malta's membership of the PTC and EPC network is essential and crucial if we Maltese are ever to generate real wealth for ourselves (rather than remaining forever dependent ultimately on the entrepreneurial spirit of foreigners, who more likely than not don't really give that much of a toss for this land we call home). Keeping Malta isolated from the PCT and EPC is the equivalent of clipping the wings of our native innovative spirit - that indomitable spirit which we Maltese have to discover if we are ever going to really fend for ourselves rather than continue going around begging for alms from one country to the next as has become our habit.

We make it difficult and complicated for foreign innovators to patent their products in our country and the rest of the world makes it difficult and complicated for our industrialists to patent their innovations around the world. The consequence: local innovation loses out heavily because it does not benefit from the simplicities of the PCT and EPC systems. The end result: the local economy remains completely at the mercy of foreigners, who can cheerfully hop back at their pleasure to their own PCT (and possibly even EPC) integrated homelands when the moment comes to register worldwide their own patents. At the same time any Maltese enterprising spirit has to remain stuck here in this insular mentality, unless of course he does not actually opt to leave everything behind, turn his back reluctantly on dear Malta and make money abroad by virtue of foreign residence and citizenship.

Investment is good for this country - so long as it is not of the type which isolates us from the PTC and EPC network! Access Euro Consulting, in their reports to the then Ministry of Economic Services, had recommended that Malta stay out of the PCT and EPC just for the sake of the generic pharmaceutical manufacturers while Malta Enterprise has just published a paper in the Journal of Generic Medicine highlighting the attractions that our "patent climate" has to offer to the generic pharmaceutical manufacturers.

The underlying emphasis on side-stepping the PCT and EPC for as long as the acquis communautaire allows us to is thoroughly undermining our own native creativity potential, the sort that can create jobs, and wealth, for our own sakes. On account of such exclusionary restrictions that come with the package of generic pharmaceutical investment, how can we be content? We should instead be ratifying the PCT and EPC right away and so release our own creativity, which will in the end lead to much more wealth than the foreign investment capital quoted by Malta Enterprise! Where has the fiducja (confidence) in ourselves gone, now that excitement of elections has passed us by?

It would be erroneous to conclude that focusing on the development of the pharmaceutical industry, to the detriment of the innovative potential of other sectors, will, in itself, bring prosperity to our islands. Such a single-minded focus, would probably be characteristic of the "tunnel vision" that was criticised by Edward Scicluna when speaking at a business breakfast on October 30, 2003: "In the civil society there exist a number of NGOs or better single self-interest organisations, many with a tunnel vision, seeking only their own sectoral interest. They influence society because society hears them only on a particular issue and society itself, the consumers for instance, are not heard. Self-interest triumphs, as a result".

I contend that the generic pharmaceutical lobby is such a self-interest group, seeking its own sectoral interest, when it manages to sway influential bodies such as Access Euro Consulting and Malta Enterprise to project a subdued and unenthusiastic view of the benefits of integrating this archipelago into the international patent registration systems.

We should strive instead to create an environment where genuine industrial creativity prospers and this will conduct to ample opportunities for high technology, intellectually based, general industrial development. This country should stop seeking sugar daddies. Its native manufacturing base should instead mature into adulthood but there is no way it can do this without integrating into the PCT and EPC registration systems. Without such international affiliations, local native industrial innovation will remain caged and fenced in, so that the generic pharmaceutical industry can do here what in other parts of the world is forbidden.