December 18, 2002
The United States was alone on Tuesday in blocking a deal at world trade talks aimed at ensuring access to cheaper medicines for poorer states facing health crises like AIDS and malaria. With an end-week deadline looming, the other 143 members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) signalled that they could accept a compromise text put forward by Mexican ambassador Eduardo Perez Motta, who has chaired the lengthy negotiations.
But US ambassador Linnet Deily told delegates Washington still wanted more clarity on just what diseases would be covered by the pact, which WTO trade ministers agreed in principle 13 months ago in Doha, Qatar. "The US continues to feel that the current proposals fail to address the concerns ministers wanted to be addressed in Doha," trade officials quoted her as telling a closed-door session.
An accord is seen as vital not only to help the millions suffering from killer diseases in Africa and elsewhere but also to keep wider talks to free up world trade on track.
Deily told journalists that the United States would continue to work with Perez Motta and WTO countries in a bid to reach an accord by Friday when the executive General Council, which must rubber stamp any deal, holds its final meeting of the year.
A further session of the WTO's TRIPS Council, which handles issues of intellectual property and patent rights, has been called for Friday morning. But envoys warned that there was no room for manoeuvre because any further changes would be rejected by other states.
"The predominant view is that if you change anything, it will all unravel," said one Latin American diplomat.
Africa prepared to accept plan
African states, which like Washington had long been unhappy with the proposed deal, although for very different reasons, told Tuesday's meeting they were prepared to accept the plan.
In Doha, trade ministers agreed poorer states facing health crises should be able to set aside intellectual property laws, or patent rights, held mainly by rich-state pharmaceutical firms, and order domestic companies to manufacture cheaper versions of the needed medicines.
However, many developing countries, and particularly African states where AIDS is killing millions each year, do not have any domestic drugs industry and would need to import the medicines.
States have wrangled long and hard over the details of how this should be done, including what safeguards to include against abuse and what diseases should be covered.
Perez Motta's 11-point plan includes some of the safeguards demanded by the rich states, and which some poorer states say will be too burdensome, but it sticks to the wording for disease coverage agreed in Doha.
Washington says that the latter, with its reference to AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria "and other epidemics," could cover virtually any health problem from cancer to baldness and undermine the international patent system.
The deadline for an agreement on the drugs issue was one of the first targets set in the Doha Round of free trade talks and failing to meet it would cast a shadow over the rest of the negotiations which are due to conclude by 2005.
The United States was one of the strongest advocates of the Round, arguing it would give a boost to a sluggish world economy. But many poorer countries only reluctantly went along, and failure to seal an accord on cheap medicines would reinforce their doubts about its benefits, trade sources say.
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