Washington Post | November 16, 2001 | By Paul Blustein, Washington Post Staff Writer
DOHA, Qatar - Considering this was a meeting of the World Trade Organization, an institution often vilified as an agent of multinational corporate capitalism, some of the results evoked surprisingly joyful reactions among advocates for the world's oppressed.
"This would have been unthinkable six months ago, or six weeks ago, or even six days ago," Ellen 't Hoen, a representative of Doctors Without Borders, said Tuesday as she clutched a freshly issued WTO declaration affirming the rights of poor countries to override drug patents and obtain cheap generic medicine for victims of AIDS and other illnesses.
Mirroring her delight was the grumpiness among representatives of the pharmaceutical industry -- precisely the sort of corporate agents so frequently depicted as the WTO's puppet masters -- who were worried that the declaration might raise new questions about the sanctity of drug companies' patents.
It was an illuminating moment in the evolution of the WTO since its famous debacle two years ago in Seattle, where tens of thousands of anti-globalization demonstrators disrupted a meeting that ended without an agreement on further trade talks.
The just concluded meeting in this Persian Gulf emirate proceeded this week with only scattered, tame demonstrations by the few dozen activists who managed to obtain visas from the Qatari authorities, and it concluded triumphantly with an accord among trade ministers from the 142 member countries to launch a new round of global trade negotiations.
But especially striking was the populist impulse behind the declaration on the drug-patent issue, which stemmed from widespread outrage about the lack of affordable medicine for millions of AIDS victims in Africa and elsewhere. The declaration said the WTO's agreement safeguarding patents and copyrights "does not and should not prevent [countries] from taking measures to protect public health."
"It has taken people a while to grasp what has happened here; this has bigger ramifications than our single issue," said James Love, a critic of the drug industry who directs Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology. "Is the WTO turning into the General Assembly of the United Nations? Is it no longer the playground of the rich and powerful? Consumer interests have now established that they can play this game."
As far as WTO officials were concerned, the victory for the AIDS activists and their allies provided a revealing example of how the Geneva-based organization works in writing the rules of global commerce -- which is to say, in an often-unwieldy fashion, by consensus, with even the smallest member nation theoretically able to block action.
In this case, several developing countries, led by Brazil, India and South Africa, pressed hard for a declaration expanding their rights to produce and obtain generic drugs.
The United States, Switzerland, Japan and other nations with major pharmaceutical companies resisted, arguing that the wording proposed by the developing countries would undermine patent rights and risk severely damaging the financial incentives for drugmakers to develop lifesaving medicines.
But the rich nations knew that if they didn't go a long way toward meeting the developing countries' demands, they might fail to gain a consensus for the items they wanted to negotiate, including lower trade barriers for their exports, and might even end up with no agreement at all. They accepted an altered version of the developing countries' draft, partly because they wanted a success at Doha to send a signal of international cooperation during a time of global political and economic trouble.
"We've got to negotiate under our leaky and imperfect umbrella, but at least our umbrella covers the small guy," said WTO Director General Michael Moore.
Of the process that led WTO critics to hail one of its declarations, he said: "I think it's been an educational journey for both sides."
Not all AIDS activists are satisfied with the declaration on patents and health, which some fear lacks legally binding force. And many of the activists attending this week's meeting continued to generally disdain the WTO, which they believe is too secretive and biased in favor of trade over other goals such as worker rights, the environment and food safety.
As the negotiators were haggling over the final wording, Greenpeace members staged a demonstration in which they ostentatiously tore up copies of the declaration launching the new trade round. (Being environmentalists, they posted notices promising to take the wastepaper aboard their ship, the Rainbow Warrior, and recycle it at the nearest facility.)
The activists' clout at the WTO is weakest when their goals aren't shared by developing country governments, whose citizens the activists purport to champion. That's often a problem for environmentalists, because trade officials in the Third World are leery of establishing international environmental standards. Such standards, they suspect, will be used as an excuse by protectionist-minded rich countries to restrict imports of goods made in poor countries.
The issue of drug patents was one on which activists and developing countries saw nearly eye-to-eye, and they worked together very effectively, with protesters in the United States and Europe pounding on their governments to show less support for the drug companies and more sympathy for AIDS victims. This week's declaration showed how potent the alliance between the activists and developing countries can be.
On Wednesday, as the WTO meeting was winding to a close, Harvey Bale, director general of the International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, was trying to put the best face on the declaration, which he had initially denounced for its ambiguous wording concerning the rights of drug patent holders. One good thing about the declaration, he said, was that it recommitted WTO members to the organization's overall intellectual property agreement.
But Bale acknowledged that business groups like his are facing a different situation from the 1970s and 1980s, when Bale was a U.S. trade official and the world trade body -- then known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade -- was much more dominated than it is today by the "Quad" powers: the United States, the European Union, Japan and Canada.
Now, Bale said, developing countries are banding together despite their differences and showing a greater readiness to use their muscle in the WTO. "That," he added, "gives the activists fertile ground."Washington Post:
