An eleventh hour deal to provide cut-price drugs for the world’s poorest people was being finalised in Geneva last night in an effort to save next month’s trade summit in Cancun, Mexico, from collapse.
After being delayed for nine months by intense lobbying from US pharmaceutical companies, the agreement between key developing countries and Washington is meant to open the door for poor countries to import copies of life-saving drugs without running foul of global patent laws.
But fears expressed by US pharmaceutical companies, led by Pfizer, that relaxing the rules would open western markets to a flood of copycat drugs, have forced poor countries to accept strict safeguards against smuggling.
The deal represents a climbdown for Washington which has single-handedly blocked agreement at the World Trade Organisation’s Geneva headquarters since December, demanding that the patent override be restricted to the poorest countries and for a limited list of diseases.
Agreement was secured after the US agreed instead to accept assurances from developing countries that they would not bend the rules for ”commercial objectives”.
Diplomats said a deal on drugs was the bare minimum needed to prevent next month’s summit of trade ministers in Cancun turning into a rerun of the WTO’s disastrous Seattle meeting, which ended in chaos after African countries walked out.
Even now, heated disagreements over agriculture and whether the liberalisation of trade should be extended into new areas are clouding last-minute preparations for next month’s meeting.
Washington was under intense pressure to deliver a package on drugs for poor countries after concessions were promised the WTO meeting in Doha, Qatar, in November 2001 as a way of getting the sceptical developing world on board. The details were supposed to be hammered out in Geneva by the end of last year, but the White House vetoed the proposed deal after heavy lob bying from US drug companies.
Aid agencies said America’s intransigence had forced the developing world to accept a flawed agreement which imposed significant hurdles on countries hoping to import cheap drugs from abroad.
Under current trade rules any country can override patents in its home market and authorise production of the generic equivalent — as the US threatened to do during the anthrax scare in 2001 to force down the price of treatment. But global trade rules prevent generic manufacturers from exporting to countries that do not have a domestic drug industry.
Under the deal, exporting countries would have to issue a compulsory licence overriding foreign patents, something the agencies fear they may be reluctant to do.
Oxfam said last night that the draft agreement left the world’s poorest states dependent on other countries standing up to intense pressure from the US pharmaceutical industry. ”This deal has been watered down so much that it isn’t really anything to cheer about,” said Oxfam’s Michael Bailey.
Ellen t’Hoen of the volunteer doctors’ organisation Médecins sans Frontières said the deal was disastrous. ”It poses so many hurdles and hoops to jump through that we are really worried it may not work at all,” she said.
”By continually demanding more restrictions, the US seems to be pushing for a watertight system so that no generic drugs ever get through to the patients in developing countries who desperately need them.
”[This] will, over time, lead to the complete drying up of availability of generic sources and will inevitably lead to increased drug prices.”
The undertaking that the Doha get-out clause, allowing the overriding of patents, should not be used for commercial advantage meant that generics companies such as Cipla in India, which undercut the multinationals to offer Aids drugs for less than $300 a year and forced the big companies to bring down their prices, would have no incentive to produce cheap copies.
”The drugs that we have access to now that are affordable are produced by commercial entities,” Ms t’Hoen said. ”We need more industrial activity and greater competition in the market. That is the mechanism which is being killed.”
She blamed pressure from the US for ”a text that is blatantly ridiculous” but also the EU for failing to join the closed discussions. ”After all the rhetoric of [Pascal] Lamy [its chief trade negotiator], he is completely absent from these talks,” she said. – Guardian Unlimited Â