Sharing knowledge

One explanation may be that the system that engendered it was built, not for sharing, but for exclusion and domination.

As humanity progresses into the 21st century, the world is dividing into those with easy access to knowledge and its fruits, and those without.

People denied knowledge are not merely subordinated, they are actually cast out, playing the role of spectators in the human race rather than runners in it. Canadian Minister Pierre Pettigrew said:

In the new economy, the victims are not only exploited, they’re excluded. You may be in a situation where you are not needed to create wealth. This phenomenon of exclusion is far more radical than the phenomenon of exploitation.

Every 15 minutes about 400 children, the equivalent of a jumbo-jet load, die from malnutrition-related disease. They are also dying from a lack of knowledge. The knowledge to save almost all of them exists, yet for various reasons it does not get through, at least in forms their community can access, afford or use.

Sixteen million hectares of forests vanish each year as poor people struggle to feed themselves, and rich ones exploit what is left. Three quarters of the world’s fisheries are fully- or over-exploited. One third of the world’s farmlands are degraded. Almost three billion people will experience severe water scarcity by 2025. Lacking the knowledge of how to farm, fish, forest or use water sustainably, this process will continue. All these spell loss of livelihoods for tens of millions, anger, conflict, global instability.

The number of international refugees has risen from 14 million to 22 million in the last decade - and this does not include a similar number displaced within their own countries.

Out of 110 conflicts worldwide since the Cold War ended in the 1990s, two thirds were driven or triggered by resource crises - shortages that for the most part could have been averted through the application of modern knowledge.

Today 25 million people are dying in Africa alone without access to patented anti-AIDS drugs. Every year, about two million people die for want of low-cost anti-malarials. Permitting so many to perish in this fashion is prompting questions about the morality of the global innovation system, who owns it, who controls it and whom it serves.

A few hundred million of the world’s richest citizens enjoy access to the fruits of modern science and technology. More than five billion are denied them or simply unable to access them. They are becoming both angry and resentful. Those who can, are solving the problem by fleeing to the rich countries in an ever-rising tide which no gunboats or detention camps can forestall.

Once this problem was regarded as largely due to the unequal distribution of wealth and it was assumed that money could fix it. It can’t, because the problem is more profound. It is about our failure to share knowledge, with all that implies - food, prosperity, security, health, power, sustainability, jobs, sound government.

The explosion in knowledge in the advanced centres of the world, and the accompanying failure to share it, is tilting the balance ever-more radically to the few and away from the other 5 billion people. Historically, such events have often presaged a violent counter-reaction.