[Ip-health] Oxfam, TWN, MSF and CPTech press conference notes on Doha exports issue

[James Love]

These are my notes from today's NGO Geneva press conference on the WTO 
negotiations on export rules for medicines.  James Love (international 
mobile phone: +1.202.361.3040, james.love@cptech.org)


Ruth Mayne, Oxfam, UK
"It is unacceptable that rich countries are backsliding on their Doha 
commitments to find effective solutions to the problem of production for 
export for poor countries . This is not just a legal technical question but 
if not resolved properly will put the lives of millions of people at risk in 
the future'.  This issue is about whether or not the WTO will allow a poor 
person in Uganda to buy drugs from the cheapest supplier.   There is still 
time to get it right this year, as promised in Doha."

Cecilia Oh, Third World Network
"This is the opportunity for the developed countries to show that they are 
committed to actually living up to their promise at Doha - to get affordable 
medicines to people who need them. The problem is, how does the WTO enable 
developing countries to get affordable from any many sources as possible, 
and what policy benefits the developing countries that are seeking to build 
up a domestic industry?  If for example, Malaysia or Thailand are to 
manufacture generic drugs, the generic producers will need a big enough 
market to justify the investments necessary to manufacture the drugs.   The 
EU and the US are seeking to protect their own domestic industries, by 
limiting the opportunities of developing country generic producers.  This 
harms poor consumers."

Ellen 't Hoen, MSF
"The EU is spreading disinformation about the legal issues concerning 
exports of medicines.  If the WTO can amend the TRIPS agreement to provide a 
limited and ineffective change in export rules, it can also provide a more 
effective and more useful change.   There is a lot of double talk about this 
issue, but at the end, it comes down to how difficult will be the WTO rules 
to export medicines to address public health problems.    Patent owners are 
entitled to be compensated in countries where their products are consumed, 
but it does not make sense to build a global trading system that makes it 
impossible for small market countries to address abuses of patent rights. At 
the end of the day, is there political will to address the health needs in 
developing countries, or will the industries protect their domestic 
industries? "

James Love, CPTech
"The US and the European Union made a promise in Doha to implement the WTO 
agreement to provide "access to medicine for all,"  and to address a glaring 
flaw in the agreement, the limitation on exports when products are produced 
under a compulsory license.  The legal issues are highly technical and 
complex, but the economic issues are fairly simple.   If generic producers 
can only sell in domestic markets, they will often not have sufficient 
economies of scale to produce cheap drugs.   Ironically, the "free trade" 
WTO is being used to prevent consumers from benefiting from global 
competition.   The WTO is supposed to fix this problem, this year.  The US 
and the European Union are now on a public relations campaign to package the 
smallest possible concessions as big benefits to poor consumers.   This is 
all in the context of cases where patent owners are engaged in abusive 
practices, such as charging prices for medicines that are unaffordable. The 
US and the EU have fought to make the Doha concessions be as limited as 
possible, and in particularly to be complex and legalistic.   There is ample 
evidence that poor countries have so far been unable to overcome even modest 
legal barriers to the use of compulsory licensing.  Public health and other 
NGOs are asking the WTO to use Article 30 of the WTO TRIPS accord to 
authorize exports of medicines to address foreign public health problems. 
Under the system endorsed by CPTech, MSF, TWN, Oxfam, Act Up, Health Gap and 
others, patent owners would be protected where medicines are consumed, but 
medicines could be made anywhere, allowing consumers to buy from the 
cheapest global suppliers.   The NGO's proposal is modeled after the current 
practice in the United States and Canada to allow  exports of generic copies 
of medicines, under Article 30 of the TRIPS, for pre-expiration testing of 
medicines.   The European Union challenged the Canadian practice of allowing 
such exports in 2000, but the Canadian export provision was upheld by the 
WTO.    In the Canadian WTO case, it is worth repeating the point made by 
Canada successfully defing its own Article 30 export provision:

	Very few countries had fully integrated brand name or generic drug 		industries 
within their borders.  Even in large countries, generic 		producers frequently 
had to obtain ingredients such as fine 			chemicals from producers in other 
countries.  Many countries had no 		generic industries at all and had to obtain 
generic (as well as 		brand name) products from other countries. Smaller 
countries that 		did have generic industries did not have domestic markets 		 
sufficiently large to enable those industries to operate on an 			economic scale. 
  Those industries had to export in order to be able 		to manufacture in 
sufficient quantities to achieve economies of 		scale, so that domestic 
consumers could receive the benefits of 		cost-effective generic products.

"It is also important to emphasize that the US and the EU are seeking to 
prevent their own consumers from benefiting from post Doha rules on exports. 
  They are doing this to prevent poor countries from being suppliers to rich 
countries in cases of abuses of patent rights.  This is ironic, because in 
the Cipro case, the US was prepared to import generic drugs from Indian 
suppliers.   This case was quite important in the getting the Doha 
declaration.  Now the US government want to close off this opportunity to 
consumers in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and every European 
country.  The US and Europe are also complaining about profits from 
exporting countries such as China, India or Brazil.   But if Brazil had not 
imported cheap HIV drugs from India and China, Africa today would not have 
access to low cost HIV drugs.  Poor consumers benefit from the largest and 
most competitive generic market, and it is cynical and wrong to imply 
otherwise.  The US and the EU should fix the export issue, and they should 
abandon their protectionist support for their domestic export industries, 
and make sure that consumers worldwide can protect themselves from abuses of 
patent rights, when such abuses occur.

------
James Love, Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org, mailto:love@cptech.org
voice: 1.202.387.8030; mobile 1.202.361.3040


-- 
------
James Love, Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org, mailto:love@cptech.org
voice: 1.202.387.8030; mobile 1.202.361.3040