By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Aug 27 2003 (IPS)

Preparations for the WTO ministerial conference next month in Mexico concluded Wednesday in a climate of dissent, marked by the developing countries’ dissatisfaction with the draft declaration to be presented to the world’s trade ministers.

One of the few exceptions amidst these tensions at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has been the discussion of poor nations’ access to low-cost medicines, which at the last minute saw an outline agreement for resolving this contentious issue that threatened to undermine the conference.

On the other issues in play, the work of the trade negotiators in Geneva is done, according to Argentina’s representative to the WTO, Alfredo Chiaradia. Now the cards are in the hands of the ministers in Cancun, he said.

The WTO became entangled nearly two years ago in the mandate for preparations for its fifth ministerial conference, to take place Sep. 10-14 in the Mexican resort city of Cancun.

The discussions of the 146 WTO member states are intended to jump-start the Doha Round of trade-liberalising talks, which have been mostly bogged down in discrepancies since they were launched in November 2001 by the previous ministerial meet, in the Qatar capital.

Paralysis has afflicted nearly all areas of the so-called Doha Development Agenda, including those considered most crucial for the process, such as agricultural trade, industrial tariffs, poor countries’ access to medicines, and other issues of vital interest to the developing world.

India’s trade representative, K.M. Chandrasekhar, underscored the inequalities between the North and South, pointing to the industrialised nations’ unwillingness to reduce their farm subsidies.

"How can they expect the developing countries to ambitiously reduce their tariffs, which is the only instrument available to them for protecting their farmers," he said.

Many developing countries depend on their farm exports for revenues and are making every effort to tear down the industrialised countries’ barriers to agricultural imports.

Uruguay’s trade representative Carlos Pérez del Castillo, current chairman of the WTO General Council, presided over the latest phase in the negotiations, and attempted to summarise the will of the member states in a draft declaration to be presented to the ministers next month in Cancun.

But his efforts proved ineffective in resolving the differences of opinion that have persisted within the Doha Round.

In a general sense, the disputes pit the industrialised North against the developing South, and both sides have said Pérez del Castillo’s draft declaration is unfavourable to their own interests.

The General Council chairman announced Wednesday that he would pass the draft declaration on to the member nations’ trade ministers nevertheless, and would accompany it with a personal letter including the objections expressed by the delegations in Geneva..

Argentine negotiator Chiaradia pointed out that the blueprint text had not been approved by the General Council, and therefore should only serve as a basis for the ministers’ discussions in Cancun.

The draft declaration will arrive at the ministerial conference along with the proposals of various blocs of delegations with respect to the Doha Round agenda items.

Among them will be the document presented by the Group of 20, the bloc of developing countries that formed last week to promote a text that is a response to the United States and European Union’s initiative on agricultural trade.

Several developing countries, including Argentina, Brazil, India and Kenya, have spoken out about the need for their trade ministers to receive information about the different positions that have been expressed throughout the preparatory negotiations for the Cancun meet.

"We had some very serious objections" to Pérez del Castillo’s draft declaration, Chiaradia said. "It is only fair that the ministers are able to study these different opinions."

With regard to poor countries’ access to low-cost drugs, the WTO council on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement took up an initiative Wednesday that would resolve the dispute brought up by the big pharmaceutical transnationals.

The declaration of the trade ministers in Doha, signed in November 2001, gave the WTO the mandate to set up a system in which poor countries faced with public health crises could have the right to produce or import generic – and therefore cheaper – medications.

The initiative is aimed at helping the developing world tackle the health crises associated with HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, among other diseases.

The solution is based on a document drawn up in December by then-chairman of the TRIPS council Eduardo Pérez Motta, of Mexico. At the time, the initiative failed when the United States blocked approval – the WTO takes most of its decisions by consensus – due to pressures from the pharmaceutical industry.

Pérez Motta proposed regulating the manufacture of medicines, and the new proposal adds mechanisms proposed by the new TRIPS chairman, Vanu Mopala Menon, which take into account the interests of the drug companies.

The trade delegations received Menon’s proposal without discrepancies, and the text is expected to be signed this week, becoming the only point of agreement in the ever-troubled Doha Round.

But the non-governmental organisations tracking the WTO talks criticised the drugs agreement.

"The proposed deal is largely cosmetic and will not make a significant difference to the millions of sick people who die unnecessarily in the Third World every year," said Celine Charveriat, representative in Geneva for the humanitarian group Oxfam International.

"If confirmed, the deal would be a betrayal of the pledge made in the Doha Declaration to put public health before patent rights," said the activist.

"It is profoundly unfair to create fresh legal obstacles for developing countries trying to obtain affordable generic medicines, purely in the interests of an industry that in the United States alone made 37 billion dollars in profit last year," said Charveriat.

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