Submitted to Grist On-line Magazine
From: Mark Ritchie Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 02:04:47 -0600
Day Four - Hot and Sweaty in Qatar
Although today is the first day when negotiations have become really serious, we have been in round-the-clock work mode for the past three days here in Doha. In some ways a great deal has happened but in other ways it seems like such a little. I hope this short report can convey some part of the feeling here in the desert.
By far the most important thing that we have accomplished thus far is the huge victory we have won in the area of the negotiations called TRIPS - Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. This is insider trade lingo for the patents on drugs and medicines. In the previous round of trade talks the pharmaceutical industry won new rules of trade for drugs to protect their private interest over public health considerations. Although there was some opposition at the time, it seemed that there was little that could be done to stop them from coming into force. However, two years ago several governments facing overwhelming AIDS disasters, including Brazil and South Africa, decided that the health of their people had to come before WTO patent rules and they began to join with a number of public interest to challenge these provisions.
In less than two years this coalition of Non-government organizations (NGOs) and governments from mostly developing countries were able to defeat the combined power of the global pharmaceutical industry and their allies in the governments of the US, Germany, the UK, Switzerland, Australia, and Canada. The bottom line is that this is the first and so far only real outcome of these talk. And it's a giant victory for civil society.
What is important about this victory is also the signal this sends about the new stage of development we have reach in the global trade justice movement. Here we are in Qatar, where any protest is difficult and we are very few in numbers (due to understandable fears for personal safety), yet we are being incredibly effective in not only blocking many bad things but in advancing our positive agenda. We know what we want to see in the way of positive fair trade rules and we have built the alliances with enough of the governments, especially in South countries, needed to strongly influence the outcome of this meeting,
IATP has a small team here in Doha, five of us from both our Minneapolis and Geneva offices. There are only about a dozen public interest NGO folks from the US, working together with around 70 NGOs from all over the world. It feels like there is a pretty good balance in terms of North-South representation and that a wide range of issues are well represented. Some things, like the drugs issue, have dominated so far but there have been workshops and other events on almost all of the key current issues -- from forestry and fisheries to food safety and gender issues.
In the agriculture talks, which we are working on round-the-clock, a few countries are blocking the talks so they seemed to be going nowhere -- the disputes are longstanding, primarily regarding subsidies.
Until now, there has been a cordial tone to almost everything and in almost every meeting. However, everyone is beginning to tire after so many days of working with little sleep, so I suspect that nerves will be more frayed and that there may be more conflict and tempers. We shall see what happens today. We were told tonight that they have informally reserved all of the meeting spaces for two extra days, so it seems we will move into an extended meeting very soon.
We were promised that tomorrow morning we could see a new "final version" of the declaration that the WTO secretariat would like to see issued at the end of the meeting. It will tell us a lot about whether the 144 members of the WTO can reach an overall agreement.:
