Global Policy Forum

by Mario Osava

Brazil's aim to enter into partnerships with China and other developing countries to create their own digital TV system is part of a nascent ''non-aligned'' movement in technology in the developing world.

Brazil's aim to enter into partnerships with China and other developing countries to create their own digital TV system is part of a nascent ''non-aligned'' movement in technology in the developing world. Argentina, Chile and India have already expressed interest in joining in a collective effort to come up with a digital TV (DTV) system better suited to their realities, according to Brazil's Communications Ministry.

The replacement of the 50-year-old analog transmission system by digital broadcasting is comparable to the leap from vinyl albums to compact discs. The new tecnological revolution will greatly expand broadcasting capabilities and give television CD-quality sound and much higher resolution and clarity, while avoiding the distortions of conventional TV screens, like the bleeding of colours. However, the new technology will not have a global broadcast standard, but several regional ones, as do analog TV and digital video discs (DVDs).

Since 2001, Brazil has been putting off choosing between one of the three existing DTV broadcast systems. The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which took office on Jan. 1, brought up the alternative of a Brazilian-designed system, on the initiative of Communications Minister Miro Teixeira, who says the country has the technological capability to develop its own standard.

Brazil, Argentina and China -- which have already begun discussing the issue -- alone offer a large enough market to ensure an economy of scale that would make the project economically viable, according to the Communications Ministry. The idea is not to come up with a totally new standard, but to add in elements that would bring existing systems into line with local realities, including industrial interests, in countries with a high proportion of poor people, who cannot afford expensive new TV sets capable of receiving DTV signals.

Another of the project's aims would be to avoid or reduce the payment of patent rights, which could run as high as 20 dollars per TV set if one of the systems already developed by the United States, Europe and Japan is adopted, explained Science and Technology Minister Roberto Amaral.

In addition, the idea is to develop a system that would take advantage of the extensive existing infrastructure of broadcast antennas in China and the countries of Latin America, which would also boost cooperation, observed Secretary of Technological Policy, Francelino Grando. Digital TV signals can be transmitted by air or cable, like those of analog systems.

There is no hurry because ''the transition to digital TV has been very slow,'' reaching only five percent of households in the United States and Europe in the past five years, Ethevaldo Siqueira, an expert in information technoloy, told IPS. Switching from one system to another requires the purchase of a costly new TV set, or a converter box that allows conventional TV sets to tune into digital signals.

In Brazil, where poverty is a much greater problem than in the United States and Europe, the transition will be even slower, and the most important thing is to develop and produce converter boxes to enable older TV sets to read signals from any of the three systems now in use, said Siqueira.

But it is a good idea to work together with China, which has decided to develop its own system, and is able to do so thanks to the sheer size of its domestic market, he said. Although Brazil does not have a big enough internal market to take off on its own, it could reach agreements by which its national industry would export to other countries of Latin America and to Africa, Siqueira added. Alliances between large developing nations, aimed at curbing technological dependence on the world's industrial powers, have already cropped up between Brazil and China, which built the first China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS-1), launched in 1999. The second CBERS is to go into orbit in August or September this year.

The agreement between the two countries, signed in 1988, also provides for the joint construction of two more satellites, to give Brasilia and Beijing autonomy in the monitoring of agricultural areas, forests, water resources, urban sprawl and the environment. Brazil is also promoting cooperation with other countries with a similar level of development, such as India, South Korea, Russia and the Ukraine, Guilherme Patriota, an adviser on international cooperation with the Ministry of Science and Technology, noted in a conversation with IPS.

Growing ties between the pharmaceutical industries of India and Brazil, for example, are promising, since both countries are producers of generic medicines, and advocate common positions in multilateral negotiations on pharmaceutical products, he pointed out. Generic medicines, identified by the name of their active ingredient, are cheaper than their brand-name equivalents, and drug giants complain that producing them amounts to intellectual piracy.

India's decision to add fuel alcohol to gasoline in a proportion of five percent to reduce air pollution has opened up another area of business between the two countries. In addition, the Brazilian firm Dedini, the country's biggest manufacturer of equipment for the sugar industry, signed a contract last month for selling its technology for the construction of alcohol distilleries to the Uttam group in India, which plans to build 30 over the next two years. Brazil has been using fuel alcohol since the 1970s, and hopes to conquer a broad market by exporting the fuel and the technology to produce it, once the Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, goes into effect.

Biotechnology is another area in which Brazil is seeking partnerships with medium development countries that share similar objectives and realities, such as tropical agriculture, comparable public health problems, and costs arising from technological dependency, said Patriota. But, he added, agreements with India in that terrain have led to few practical advances so far.

In the field of aerospace, Brazil is interested in cooperation not only with China, but with Argentina, Russia and the Ukraine as well. Brazil is offering its Alcántara satellite launching base, which sits virtually on the equator, the ideal location for launching missiles and satellites.

An association of developing countries for the creation of a digital TV system would be ''emblematic'' of that advance in horizontal technological cooperation, said Patriota.

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