Washington Post | November 13, 2001 | By Paul Blustein, Washington Post Staff Writer
DOHA, Qatar -- Officials attending a World Trade Organization meeting here, negotiating feverishly into the early morning, appeared to be nearing an agreement to launch a new round of global trade talks.
In one strong indication that the 140-odd WTO member countries were moving toward resolving their most contentious disputes, the United States and a number of developing countries, including Brazil and India, reached tentative agreement on a declaration aimed at ensuring the rights of poor nations to override drug-company patents and obtain cheap medicine for combating diseases such as AIDS. The document was criticized by the pharmaceutical industry, while praised by some AIDS activists.
Emerging briefly from the marathon talks Monday evening, Michael Moore, the WTO director-general, welcomed that development and said, "Things look very, very promising. But nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. This is not over yet. The next 24 hours will be critical for the global trading system."
The meeting in this Persian Gulf emirate is aimed mainly at agreeing on an agenda for multiyear negotiations -- in other words, a list of issues that countries are willing to talk about, not a list of steps they are willing to take right away. The Bush administration has attached enormous importance to a successful outcome, which has taken on political as well as economic significance in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. If the meeting here ends in failure as did the one in Seattle two years ago, the spirit of international cooperation will be damaged, the White House has warned, and the WTO will lose credibility as the rule maker and dispute settler of international commerce.
But compromise has proven difficult because so many countries and interest groups fear they will lose more than they will gain in the process. Developing countries complain that the United States and other rich nations reaped substantial benefits in the last negotiating round, known as the Uruguay Round, without opening their own markets as much as had been promised to goods such as textiles and apparel, in which poor countries are most competitive.
Officials predicted that talks would go up to the last minute on the sensitive issue of trade in agricultural products. Japan and South Korea, which use a variety of steep tariffs and other measures to protect their farmers, have bowed to pressure to negotiate on the issue. But the European Union was resisting the idea of entering negotiations that would have as their goal the phasing out of agricultural subsidies; Brussels maintains an enormous subsidy program for its farmers.
"The EU is pretty isolated at this point," said Ann M. Veneman, the U.S. secretary of agriculture, voicing hope that this would force Brussels to relent on an issue that is of keen interest to more competitive agricultural producers including the United States, Canada, Australia and many poor nations.
The tentative agreement on drug patents marked a breakthrough on an issue that has sparked impassioned protests by AIDS activists and threatened to derail the meeting. At stake was whether the WTO's rules concerning patents and other forms of intellectual property could allow countries, especially those undergoing public health emergencies such as widespread HIV/AIDS infections, to obtain access to generic knockoffs of drugs that can cost tens of thousands of dollars annually per patient in industrialized nations.
Brazil and India had pressed for a declaration stating that nothing in the WTO's rules would prevent a country from taking measures to protect public health. That wording was strongly opposed by the United States, Switzerland and other nations with large drug industries on the grounds that it would create an enormous exception to the international rights of drug patent holders, which would reduce the profit inducement for the pharmaceutical industry to spend heavily on research and development.
But U.S. negotiators dropped their insistence on much narrower language, and the compromise document released Monday said, in its key paragraph, "We agree that the [WTO intellectual property] agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health." It added, in a concession important to Washington, that member countries reiterated their commitment to the WTO intellectual-property regime.
"This would have been unthinkable two years ago, and it shows how far the world has come," said Jamie Love, who heads the Consumer Project on Technology, a group that has pressed hard for easing drug patents. Love pronounced himself "happy" with the overall thrust of the document, although he was disappointed that it did not explicitly solve the problem of ensuring that countries unable to produce generic drugs themselves can obtain them from other countries.
Far more dissatisfied was Harvey Bale, director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations, who argued that the language would have an adverse impact on research into lifesaving medicine. The draft declaration is "ambiguous," he said. "So if I'm an R&D director with $500 million that I'm thinking of investing on developing an AIDS drug or a cancer drug, I'm going to be careful."Washington Post:
