[Ip-health] Nobel Laureate on TRIPS

[nr@vsnl.com]

Here is what Joseph Stiglitz, the joint winner of the 2001 Nobel in economics, said on October 11 at a press briefing about AIDS, TRIPS and the prices of medicines, among other things. 
Academics from Harvard and elsewhere may find this useful.
regards
Ram Reddy


Extracts:
"...Intellectual property rights are not part of natural law. They're manmade... 
"When I was at the Council of Economic Advisers in the White House during the period in which Uruguay was being debated, both the Council and the Office of Science and Technology policy believed very strongly that the TRIPS agreement that was being negotiated was unbalanced. ...But TRIPS was driven, the intellectual property regime, was driven by commercial interests in the U.S. Trade Representative's Office. We could not get in. 
"I raised the concern, I was worried about issues about what would happen if, under TRIPS, they raised the prices of drugs in a way that would not make those drugs accessible to people, and they would therefore die? At that time in '94, those concerns fell on deaf ears. 
In the year 2000, the drug companies did what we feared that they would do. In the context of AIDS, a very visible disease, the international protest was very loud, and there was a pulling back from that. But that was already there, and the fact that that agreement was signed in that way reflects the nature of the imbalance. "


For transcript of briefing see
http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/transcripts/ts101101.htm