WORLD NEWS: Stage set for clash at WTO meeting over drug patents
Financial Times, Oct 25, 2001 By MICHAEL MANN and FRANCES WILLIAMS
With just over two weeks to go before the World Trade Organisation's ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar, the stage is being set for a damaging north-south clash over demands by developing countries for a "pro-public health" interpretation of the WTO's intellectual property agreement, which would give them wide powers to override drug patents.
Trade diplomats said yesterday that intensive talks in Geneva over the past few days had failed to bridge differences between the WTO's poorer members, which are united on this issue, and a US-led group of industrialised nations, which fear evisceration of the WTO's agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property (Trips) granting international patent protection for pharmaceuticals.
Washington, backed by Switzerland, Canada, Japan and Australia, has balked at the insistence of developing nations led by Brazil and India for a declaration by ministers in Doha that "nothing in the Trips agreement shall prevent governments from taking measures to protect public health".
The US and its allies say this formulation would allow countries to drug patents. However, developing countries say it is a political imperative. "It really is a deal-breaker," one developing country WTO ambassador said this week, adding: "I fear the process is going to fail."
Stuart Harbinson, chairman of the WTO's ruling general council, is now struggling to produce a draft declaration by tomorrow (Friday), alongside a revised version of a more general ministerial declaration setting out a possible agenda for new trade negotiations.
The Trips declaration is meant to affirm and clarify the right of poorer nations to use measures such as compulsory licensing to ensure cheap supplies of essential drugs to treat Aids, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases. Trips already provides broad flexibility for such measures. In addition, Washington has said it would be willing to grant least developed countries a 10-year extension to 2016 to implement Trips and to pledge not to challenge moves by sub- Saharan African countries to obtain cheap Aids and other life-saving drugs.
Pascal Lamy, EU trade commissioner, told the European parliament: "We are actively involved in trying to tone down the most extreme positions, to try to get agreement in Doha on a substantial political declaration which reconciles the flexibility in the Trips agreement with developing countries' need for access to drugs and the need to guarantee innovation in research."
Additional reporting by Michael Mann in Strasbourg
Copyright: The Financial Times Limited