[Ip-health] Susan Finston's WSJ op-ed: "Doha Catches the Avian Flu"

[Mike Palmedo]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113210764904798506.html?mod=opinion_main_featured_stories_hs

Doha Catches the Avian Flu

Wall Street Journal (Europe ed.)
By SUSAN K. FINSTON
November 16, 2005

Avian flu may or may not become a pandemic but it's already infected
global trade talks.

In the run-up to next month's World Trade Organization meeting in Hong
Kong, most press coverage has focused on the high-profile disagreements
over farm subsidies and tariffs on agricultural and industrial goods and
services. A less-noticed but important part of the so-called Doha round
of trade talks are the rules that govern the WTO.

Here, discord over an amendment to the agreement on Trade Related
Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, threatens to boil
over politically. Specifically, members have been unable to settle on a
provision that would allow the production of medicines under compulsory
licensing for export to poor countries lacking manufacturing capacity.
Under proposed language, developing countries without domestic
pharmaceutical producers would be able to issue compulsory licenses to
overseas producers, like India's Cipla, to meet their market needs in
the event of a national public health emergency. Under terms agreed in
2003, this amendment was to include protections against spurious or
non-humanitarian usage -- restricting compulsory licensing to clear
emergencies and preventing poor patients from receiving counterfeit
medications -- as well as the diversion of these cheap generic drugs
from the African nations for which they are intended to lucrative
markets in Europe.

But African states are now demanding that these safeguards be scrapped
on the grounds that they create new barriers to medicine access. To
strengthen their case, these developing countries and activists who have
been trying to tear down intellectual property rights for decades are
now playing on public fears about a potential avian flu pandemic.

Deleting the safeguards, however, might very well put African patients
at greater risk than ever before. Both diversion of drugs and
counterfeiting of HIV/AIDS medicines have been documented in Uganda and
elsewhere in the developing world, with disastrous impact. Counterfeit
or substandard drugs contribute substantially to the growth of
drug-resistant HIV/AIDS strains, while diversion of cheap generic drugs
to Europe threatens continuing supplies of essential medicines for the
poorest and most vulnerable patients in Africa. This "solution" actually
would make it harder for stressed public health institutions in
developing countries to get essential medicines to patients.

But in the reality-optional Geneva trade talks, these facts are irrelevant.

Over the next few weeks, many expect to see further concessions to
anti-patent activists and developing countries in the form of new
carve-outs for intellectual property relating to medicines as a way of
resolving the issue before the Hong Kong meeting. This means that
developed states may well give in to demands on the TRIPS and public
health issue without getting anything in return. This is exactly what
happened in Cancun in 2003.

In truth, there is no action item on the medicine access issue that
requires resolution before Hong Kong, and some unlikely developing
countries like Brazil and Malaysia have pointed this out during recent
discussions. But many key WTO members are all too eager to move on
medicine access before Hong Kong to clear space for other dubious issues
on the Doha agenda. These include European demands for broader
protection of geographic indications relating to specialty farm products
and increasing pressure from Brazil and India to dilute biotechnology
patents.

With all this in mind, it's clear that an early resolution of the access
to medicines issue in the weeks leading to the Hong Kong Ministerial
could cause much more long-term damage to commercial interests in the
U.S. and elsewhere than the headline-grabbing agriculture talks.

Ms. Finston is a research associate with the Institute for Policy
Innovation.