GENEVA, Dec 18 (AFP) - The World Trade Organisation has until Friday to reach agreement on how to help poor countries gain access to affordable medicines in the face of US resistance prompted by Washington's concerns for the patent rights of its pharmaceutical industry.
A last-chance meeting is slated for Friday to hammer out a deal before trade delegates leave town for the winter holidays.
Their task is to agree on a system enabling countries without a pharmaceutical industry to override patents and import cheaper generic copies of patented medicines to treat illnesses such as AIDS or malaria.
Ministers meeting in the Qatari capital Doha in November last year gave the Geneva-based WTO until the end of 2002 to devise a solution to the high-profile problem.
For the moment there is no deal, largely because of US objections to certain wording in a draft text. If agreement is reached, the new regime would enter into force in 2003. If not, the already protracted negotiations would resume next year.
WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi recently warned members that failure to meet the deadline could be to "our collective discredit" and underscored that what is at issue is a humanitarian problem.
But US Under Secretary of State for Commerce Grant Aldonas on Tuesday played down the significance of a failure to meet the deadline.
During a visit to Brussels, he said it would not be a disaster since medicines were available and US companies already financed systems for getting them to African countries.
He was relaying the arguments by pharmaceutical laboratories that access to medicine is principally determined by such factors as infrastructure, care systems and customs rights.
Harvey Bale, director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' Associations, has said that if there were no accord, it would not affect the delivery of a single anti-AIDS drug to anyone anywhere in the world.
He has also insisted that generic drugs produced in India, Brazil or anywhere else can be exported to Africa until 2005 when developing countries must conform with WTO intellectual property rights rules.
One of the main concerns for industrialised countries in the WTO negotiations has been to ensure that safeguards will prevent the re-export of cheap generic drugs -- destined for poorer countries -- back into developed states.
In the worst case scenario, one western diplomat commented recently, such generic drugs could "not even leave the airport".
But the other fundamental problem, which remains unresolved, is the scope of diseases covered under the more relaxed rules.
Most WTO members, including the European Union and African states, have now rallied around a draft text despite what they consider imperfections and ambiguities.
Some diplomats fear changing the text, which was presented at the start of the week and is the third draft so far, could upset the delicate balance and unravel the process.
But the United States is demanding more specific wording than is currently proposed. The draft refers to "public health problems ... especially those resulting from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics".
Washington fears this formulation could open the way for drugs for non-infectious illnesses such as diabetes or asthma falling under the new regime.
Developing countries and health campaigners had pressed for as wide a scope as possible.
"The US was ready to take the blame, no-one else was," said one campaigner who added that he believed some non-governmental organisations and various developing countries were secretly relieved about the US blockage.
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