What do Patents and Peanut Butter Have to do With Starving Kids?

There's been plenty of good press about Plumpy'nut, the "miracle" food that has saved countless starving children over the past few years. But not much has been written about the patent that sustains the small French company behind this humanitarian wonder.

Is Plumpy' nut another laudable example of doing well by doing good? Or will protecting the patent lead to yet another bottleneck in yet another under-served area of global health?

My interest in this topic started innocently enough with an offhand remark directed at me at a nutrition conference I attended two weeks ago.

The gist of the remark was that Nutriset, the maker of Plumpy'nut, was protecting its investment by warning other commercial enterprises, as well as humanitarian groups, not to produce their own versions of the therapeutic food. (The recipe is dead simple: so many peanuts, so much dried milk, a little oil and some vitamins and minerals. The innovation comes from realizing, among other things, that the right mix doesn't require dilution with water, which is often a problem in the developing world.)

A little search engine digging, a few e-mails and in-person conversations later, and it feels to this longtime health journalist that there is some meat in this story.

So, now I'm collecting information, original sources, suggestions for people to talk to, etc, at tightly focused web site called, straightforwardedly enough, Patents and Peanut Butter.

I'd like it to be a group effort--sort of an experiment in collaborative reporting. (I've been reading Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.) But am prepared to do a lot of the heavy lifting myself until things get going.

By creating a separate blog, I hope to counter some of the chaotic, hit-or-miss nature of the Web. But who knows, that may turn out to be an entirely unnecessary step. The great thing about being at Harvard for a year, is that I can try new things out while the Nieman Foundation foots the bills.