HEALTH-RIGHTS: Healing the Poor Under WTO Rules

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MEXICO CITY, Dec 5 1999 (IPS) - Indian physicist Vandana Shiva added his voice to the chorus of disapproval of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) conference in Seattle last week in protesting over the threat to medical aid posed by WTO rules.

Shiva has long been critical of the WTO’s agreement on Trade- Related Aspects of Intellectual property rights (TRIPS)

“The TRIPS agreement militates against peoples right to health by conferring unrestricted monopoly rights to TNCs (transnational corporations) in the vital health sector.”

Other health activists also made a similar case in Seattle -that affordable drugs for the Third World’s poor must not be traded to fatten the coffers of multinational pharmaceutical companies.

TRIPS is one of the features that comes within the purview of WTO following the negotiations under the Uruguay Round of trade talks, which was signed by over 130 countries in Marakesh, Morocco, in 1994.

Under it, countries must grant patents for a minimum of 20 years to any invention, including pharmaceutical products, before which other manufacturers could be granted licences to reproduce the product

For developing countries, such a requirement means amending their patent legislation relating to drugs in order to be TRIPS compliant.

Health activists such as the Washington-based Consumer Project on Technology (CPT), making every effort to stymie TRIPS, discovered a loop-hole in the WTO’s rules and capitalised on it.

According to Jamie Love of CPT, this means that costly drugs for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) can be made available cheaply to poor countries by avoiding pharmaceutical industry patents.

The loop-hole stemmed from two features – “compulsory licensing” and “parallel importing” – which, for example, would enable countries to “produce their own AIDS pills and cut the price they pay by more than 80 percent.”

According to current calculations, the mix of drugs required to turn AIDS from its killer potential to a chronic disease amounts to nearly 12,000 dollars per individual each year, a figure that health activists consider too prohibitive for a patient in the Third World.

The pharmaceutical industry, however, sees the situation in different light.

One spokesman for the industry told a US newspaper on the eve of the Seattle talks that such tactics were “an assault on ‘intellectual property’ protection, without which companies won’t make the investments in research and development needed to discover new drugs for AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other global killers.”

Another added, the issue was far more complex than simply marking down the prices charged by drug companies. “We don’t believe parallel importing is proper.”

But such international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as the French-based Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF) are hardly convinced.

In the run-up to the WTO gathering, MSF, which won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, launched a global campaign to advocate for more affordable drugs in the developing world.

It argued that public health interests should be paramount when conceiving pharmaceutical and health policies.

“Unnecessary barriers to access essential medical products will lead to an increase of preventable illnesses and death, particularly in developing countries. In our view international trade regulations of essential health care goods merits a new approach in which public interest is the key motive rather than commercial interest,” MSF declared.

In Kenya, an MSF representative warned the government that a new bill conforming to WTO standards would harm the health of millions of people if it passed into law.

Of particular concern to MSF was the TRIPS clause, which would affect the health of Kenya’s entire population, “by giving multinational pharmaceutical companies power to monopolise the market, making drugs unaffordable.”

MSF’s warning came at a time when in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, when AIDS patients regularly are advised to return home to die because treatment for AIDS-related meningitis is too expensive, due to patent protections.

Asian health activists agreed with the MSF view pointing to the impact of such monopoly rules in Thailand in the 1990s, during its attempt fight the growing spread of AIDS.

The US government’s effort to protect its pharmaceutical patients led to pressure on the Thai government, forcing the latter to restrict the use of cheap patented drugs and ban their imports. This, reduced that East Asian country’s effort to combat the disease.

US President Bill Clinton, however, provided some hope for the future when he visited Seattle to announce that US trade policy would take into account the urgent need by poor countries for lifesaving drugs.

This was a significant shift from the US policies of the past, and in the fall-out from the collapse of the WTO conference in setting up a new round of talks on global trade, activists were now concerned how the pharmaceutical industry would react.