NEW DELHI--India's Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran has called for redesigning and expanding the mandate of the World Health Organization to eliminate inequities he says are the result of the World Trade Organization's intellectual property rights regime.
"The patent rights born out of intellectual property fail the world's poor. Nations are more interested in strengthening the WTO. Instead, WHO must be redesigned and expanded to fill up the gaps and remove the inequities created by IPR and to take care of public health and other needs of the poor," Maran said July 5 at the start of a three-day forum of the World Intellectual Property Organization in New Delhi.
"Only this kind of attitude can save humanity and the world," Maran said. He said while the pharmaceutical industries spend about $27 billion each year basically to help the better off to live even better, the last new drug for tuberculosis, which kills about 2 million people every year, was invented 30 years ago. He said that among the biggest sellers are drugs to grow hair, relieve impotence etc.
Stressing the need for a new international treaty under a sui generis system for the protection of a traditional system of medicines, the minister said that international cooperation on intellectual property rights issues and the international development agenda must complement each other. Maran also made reference to India's commitment to strike the right constructive balance in this field.
Citing the example of United States Patents and Trademarks office granting patents on turmeric and neem, Maran charged that one of the biggest problems is the increasing use of intellectual property protection for commercial purposes in so-called ''biopiracy.'' ''These are nothing but theft of the intellectual rights of the poor by the rich sanctioned by [the WTO's Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property]'' or TRIPS. "Now we have to fight for basmati, Indian curry etc."
Asserting that the problem of biopiracy may not be resolved by patent revocation actions and domestic biodiversity legislation alone, the Indian minister said there is a need to provide appropriate legal and institutional means for recognizing the rights of indigenous communities for their traditional knowledge, based on biological resources, at the international level.
Maran also slammed the existing IPR regime for perpetuating the technological gulf between the developed and the developing countries and said that the developing countries have been forced to satisfy the ''unreasonable obligations'' imposed by the Uruguay Round of talks that led to formation of the WTO
"There is a proverb that just because the camel knelt down, it was loaded. The developing countries met with the same fate in the Uruguay Round because they knelt down. Thus, knowingly or unknowingly, the developing countries have made a major concession of vital nature, and the whole architecture of international trade has to be fundamentally recast by national governments."
"Instead of helping the developing countries, the developed countries--the victors in the field--threaten the vanquished developing countries with sanctions. With a gun pointed at their temple, the developing countries have no other go but to fulfill the unreasonable obligations which they unwittingly undertook to perform during the Uruguay Round," Maran charged. "The new agency, the WTO, is responsible for policing and the pressure is mounting on the Third World governments to implement the agreement through national legislation," the minister said.
Problems With TRIPS
Maran said there were basic inequities and a lot of ''loopholes'' in the TRIPS accord. The application of the transitional periods established by the accord is insufficient, he said, and there is not enough time for countries to introduce changes in their legislation and infrastructure for administration of intellectual property rights. Emphasizing the importance of intellectual property in the era of knowledge-based economies and the need to ensure equal opportunity among nations to enjoy the benefits of knowledge-based progress, Maran said that intellectual property should ensure the protection of basic human values and environment and ameliorate the major human problems of food and disease. The benefits of intellectual property should transcend to all creators and users without distinction or discrimination of any kind, he said.
"The industrialized nations extensively used reverse engineering and other methods of imitative innovations during their own process of industrialization. After having fully used that, they closed the door to developing countries by restricting them, thereby making technological catching up more difficult then before."
Maran continued: "Notwithstanding frequent reaffirmation of this self-evident point of view, there is today a mismatch between what is being intended in all sincerity and what is being perceived, especially by developing and least-developed nations. The controversies that have affected the WTO are symptomatic of this mismatch."
Several delegates attending the meeting later noted that although the minister's remarks were in order, WIPO does not have the authority to remedy any of the problems that the developing countries like India are objecting to, including the absence of protection for traditional medicinal knowledge.
By Harbaksh Singh Nanda
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