Asia Times: Medicine debate threatens to poison WTO talks


	November 9, 2001	atimes.com

Global Economy

Medicine debate threatens to poison WTO talks
By Gustavo Capdevila

DOHA - Intellectual property rules that obstruct poor countries' access to medicine will be a crucial issue at the Fourth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which begins on Friday here in the Qatar capital. Several countries threaten to boycott future trade talks if the matter is not resolved, say activists.

Keith Rockwell, the WTO's press director, acknowledged last week that without an agreement to settle the conflict between patent rights and access to low-cost medications there will be no ministerial declaration, the conference's final objective.

Developing countries, led by a bloc of African nations, are pushing for a special declaration from the conference that interprets existing trade rules in such a way that it confirms the right of governments to ensure access to medications for their populations. But the United States and Switzerland, home to the largest pharmaceutical transnationals, oppose an explicit declaration because they say current standards grant poor countries sufficient freedoms to protect public health.

Increasing pressure has been exerted on developing countries in the past few days to convince them to change their stance on the matter, said attorney Severina Rivera, who arrived in Doha as a representative of the US office of Oxfam, a Britain-based non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to humanitarian efforts.

Rivera said that US Trade Representative Roberto Zoellick took advantage of a meeting last week in Washington with his African counterparts to pressure them to agree to Washington's agenda on pharmaceuticals and property rights in exchange for what she said were "little rewards". The United States threatened to withdraw certain grants and aid programs and used the threat "to break the unity among the different African countries", Rivera charged. Zoellick used the same approach with Central American and Caribbean countries, also offering them "small benefits and loans", according to Rivera, who said her information was based on statements received from members of the US Congress.

The NGOs arriving in Qatar, which promise intense lobbying efforts aimed at the delegates of the WTO's 142 member states, say that the position of the developing countries is short-sighted and that they are wasting an unprecedented opportunity in Doha to reform the global system of drug-related patents. The final declaration on intellectual property and health must establish that vital medicines cannot be sold at prices that are beyond the means of poor countries, said the Oxfam representative.

In the draft of the ministerial conference's final declaration, written by chairman of the WTO General Council, Stuart Harbinson, ambassador from Hong Kong, the section on access to medication contains two options for the interpretation of the existing policy, detailed under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, known as TRIPS.

Option One states that "nothing in the TRIPS agreement shall prevent members from taking measures to protect public health". Accordingly, the TRIPS agreement "shall be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO members' right to protect public health and, in particular, to ensure access to medicines for all", reads the first alternative in the draft document. The text also reaffirms the right of WTO members "to use, to the full, the provisions in the TRIPS agreement" that permit flexibility in obtaining access to pharmaceuticals.

The second option in the draft declaration limits the flexibility of the TRIPS agreement to situations of public health crises, such as HIV/AIDS and other pandemics. It further clarifies that the declaration "does not add or diminish the rights and obligations" of WTO members stipulated in that agreement.

Rivera commented that the first option does not reflect the position of developing countries as it claimed to do. The text, she said, "does not have what developing countries want, which is a reaffirmation that they have the widest options possible to employ all policy options for public health concerns".

The draft limits policy options to public health crises and national emergencies and ignores other diseases associated with poverty, such as tuberculosis and malaria, which are very widespread, though do not necessarily rise to the same level of national emergency as HIV/AIDS does, according to Rivera. She added that several countries, the African nations and India among them, are threatening to leave the WTO because of the dispute.

Ali Mchumo, Tanzania's ambassador before the WTO and spokesman in Geneva for the group of Least Developed Countries, charged that the industrialized countries are pressing for a more restrictive text on the flexibility of the TRIPS agreement to the detriment of the world's developing countries.

(Inter Press Service)