How do you patent indigenous knowledge? Most pharmaceutical companies have stopped trying.

People often think of indigenous tribes as being backwards or ignorant, but they know a lot of amazing things that we don’t. Instead of English Lit or Poli Sci, they get fast-tracked into a far more challenging major: How To Thrive In The World’s Most Savage Environments. The producers of Survivor ought to add a local to the next series — they’d win every immunity challenge, clean the Westerners’ collective clocks, and probably still gain some weight while they were at it.

In my travels, I’ve seen an Australian aborigine, a Peruvian Amazon guide, and a Ugandan translator casually demonstrate that where I saw blank and forbidding jungle, they saw a hardware store, arsenal, pantry and pharmacy. Need some soap, or disinfectant, or poison, or polish, or a snack? Mother Nature can and will provide.

So: on one side of the rich-poor divide, you have a small and diminishing group of tribes who happen to be the last repository of thousands of years of collective botanical research. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies around the world are on a relentless hunt for biologically active compounds they can turn into lucrative drugs. Should be a match made in heaven, right? I wish.

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I am always suspicious of megaprojects, which tend to be mostly about national pride, political legacies, and trickle-down corruption. (This is true back home, too: witness Montreal’s crumbling Big Owe stadium, and the useless white mastodon that is Mirabel airport.) Well, projects don’t get much more mega than the Panama Canal. My favourite statistic from the Canal’s museum is that its excavation required 60 million pounds of dynamite. Whole wars have been fought with less.

I admit it’s hard to argue with the general usefulness of halving the seafaring distance between New York and San Francisco, but this Eighth Wonder of the World is not without its controversies. Its history provides useful illustrations for a checklist of megaproject dos and don’ts:

Don’t: Kill tens of thousands of people and then fail through stubborn incompetence. Really, this should be Rule One for any project, but nobody told the French, who in 1880 decided they would dig a sea-level canal across the isthmus, rather than building one with locks. 22,000 workers died, mostly from malaria and dengue fever. No canal was dug. The French tend not to talk about this episode much when itemizing the triumphs of their glorious history. (more…)

Sexy tech is often useless, and useful technology is often deeply unsexy. Take this donkeyOne of the problems with writing about developing-world technology is that all too often the sexy tech is useless, and the useful tech is deeply unsexy. Innovations that actually change lives in a profound and meaningful way are frequently grimy, clumsy, noisy and ugly. Like this donkey:

That’s not quite a non sequitur. What you have in this photo (taken a four-hour walk from the nearest road in the foothills of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains) are two eras of technology, side by side: animal power, and in the hut behind it, hydro power.

Hill country is rough country. Think Appalachian hillbillies, Bosnian ethnic cleansing, Bolivian coups, Nepali Maoists, Papua New Guinea blood vendettas, Colombian paramilitary strongholds, the Rwandan genocide, Osama Bin Laden’s hideout: all lands of steep, barely accessible hills and valleys, bloody tribalism and abject poverty. (I’ll concede Switzerland as the exception that proves the rule.) (more…)

How to ruin entire nations and destroy untold millions of lives, as explained to me by a slender young man with a pencil moustache, a furtive look, and a machete dangling in a braided leather scabbard on his hip, in a jungle drug laboratory — two benches covered with a plastic tarp — a day’s walk from the nearest road, in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains:

1. Collect coca leaves. This is easy enough: coca grows like a weed, you get four harvests a year, and the 100kg of leaves a skilled worker can collect in a single day can be processed into 400 grams of cocaine.
2. Powder the leaves with salt and chalk dust, mix well, stomp with your rubber boots for 15 minutes as if you’re crushing grapes to make wine, and wait a little while.
3. Soak the results with gasoline. Cover in a vat, seal it airtight, and wait for several hours.

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Colombia is a seriously schizophrenic country. From a briefing at Doctors Without Borders to learn about narco-terrorists

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA—This is a seriously schizophrenic country. On a recent morning I went from a briefing at Doctors Without Borders’ local headquarters, where I learned about a skyrocketing refugee count from newly emerging groups of narco-terrorists, and massacres where the killers played soccer with their victims’ severed heads; then I went across town and discovered an terrific made-in-Colombia technical innovation that just might change a whole lot of lives for the better.

The company is Gemalto, and the innovation is banking from your mobile phone. From any mobile phone, so long as it’s GSM (the standard used by most of the world, including Rogers, Fido, T-Mobile, Cingular, and AT&T.) Their key innovation was miniaturizing their software so that it fits entirely onto a SIM card — that little notched chip which is your phone’s removable soul, as opposed from its Nokia or Motorola body.

(Technical detail, for those so inclined: their lead designer German Martinez actually managed to stuff a secure Java applet into 18 kilobytes, which, take it from this former software engineer, is the programming equivalent of nailing a quadruple axle through flaming hoops in a tiger cage.)

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Bestselling novelist Jon Evans begins his third-world tech blog, exclusive to walrusmagazine.com

COLOMBIA—Welcome to World Fast Forward’s inaugural post!

In honour of the event I have instructed my editor to break a bottle of champagne on the server rack. I’m sure he wouldn’t dare disobey. [Ed. note: Jon's new around here.]

Hi. My name’s Jon Evans. I’m an author, an engineer, and a bit of a travel junkie. I write novels, journalism, and now, World Fast Forward — a blog devoted to exploring how technology is revolutionizing the developing world.

Don’t look now, but we’re in the midst of one of the most amazing transformations in history. No, I’m not talking about the stock market. Think bigger. When the historians of the future write about this era, the Great Crash of 2008, the invasion of Iraq, and the fall of the World Trade Center will be seen as irrelevant sideshows. (more…)