[e-drug] WSJ on WTO Drugs - Sydney

["Ellen 't Hoen" <ethoen@hotmail.com>]

E-drug: WSJ on WTO Drugs - Sydney
---------------------------------------------

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1037231555879895868.djm,00.html

[copied as fair use]

Expect Progress to Be Tough
At WTO Summit on Drugs

By NEIL KING JR.
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


WASHINGTON -- Sharp differences over providing poor countries with access to
inexpensive drugs for AIDS and other diseases promise to cloud this week's
World Trade Organization summit.

A drug-patent compromise is a top priority for trade ministers from the
U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, China, India, Japan and a host of developing
countries when they meet in Sydney, Australia. The session will also hit on
hot-button topics such as agricultural subsidies in rich countries. The
trade ministers called the "mini-ministerial," beginning Thursday night and
running through Friday, to try to iron out several issues that threaten to
hold up the current round of WTO talks.

Despite optimistic talk from drug-producing countries such as the U.S.,
skepticism runs high that the 144 countries of the WTO can reach a
compromise next month on the drug-access issue, which has dogged the WTO for
years. Failure to cut a deal this year will slow progress on the overall
trade talks, which are supposed to wrap up by 2005.

Trade ministers agreed last year that poorer countries facing serious health
threats should be allowed to avoid international drug patents by buying
generic copies from manufacturers in other countries. The agreement was
critical to launching the latest round of global trade talks, but ministers
left the details to be hammered out by the end of 2002.

Both the EU and the U.S., the world's two major drug producers, have offered
drug-patent proposals that are far more restrictive than those favored by
developing countries and many nongovernmental organizations. The EU and U.S.
plans would limit patent-busting production to drugs needed to fight
epidemics such as AIDS and malaria, and then only for the poorer developing
countries. There also would be strict limits on which countries could
produce the generics.

Developing countries want access to a wider range of drugs, while a large
coalition of NGOs is pushing to allow any poorer country to contract for
delivery of patented medicines from whomever it chooses.

"This is nowhere near close to a breakthrough. Those who think it is are
guilty of wishful thinking," said Ellen 't Hoen, who leads the drug-access
campaign for the Paris-based Doctors Without Borders.

Success at the summit, a U.S. trade official said, will depend "on whether
people want to find a practical solution or one that would undermine the
WTO's agreement on intellectual-property rights." The official criticized
NGOs for "trying to break patent protections on every conceivable health
product, even X-ray machines."

Protesters in Sydney hope to turn the event into another high-profile
condemnation of what they see as the dominance of multinational companies
over the poor in the developing world. Police have erected two miles of
fencing around the venue for the talks at Sydney's Olympic Park and have
banned all downtown protest marches Thursday.

U.S. pharmaceutical companies have fought hard to keep a WTO generic-drug
agreement as limited as possible, fearing a wave of patent infringements
that could result in prescription drugs washing back into Europe or North
America from developing countries.

-- Phillip Day in Sydney contributed to this article.

Write to Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com3

Ellen 't Hoen, LL.M.
MSF- Access to Essential Medicines Campaign
8, rue Saint-Sabin, 75544 Paris Cedex 11
tel: + 33 (0) 1 40212836
fax: + 33 (0) 1 48066868
e-mail: ellen.t.hoen@paris.msf.org
Web-site: www.accessmed-msf.org
[details added by moderator. BS]



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