BRUSSELS, Dec 23 (AFP) - The European Union's executive commission said Monday a US proposal in the WTO debate on ways to ensure poor countries have access to life-saving medicines was important but insufficient.

"It is an important proposal," a spokesman for European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy told AFP.

But he said "it does not solve the problem of countries that do not have the capacity to produce medicines."

He was reacting to an announcement from the office of US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick that Washington would not go to the World Trade Organization to challenge "any WTO member that breaks WTO rules to export drugs produced under compulsory license to a country in need."

The United States made the pledge after its representatives at WTO talks in Geneva last week refused to back an agreement that would have relaxed global patent rules.

The new regime would have enabled poor countries without a pharmaceutical industry to import cheaper generic copies of patented drugs to combat illnesses such as AIDS or malaria.

The Geneva talks broke off early last Saturday, with negotiators representing WTO members agreeing to make another stab at reaching a deal next year. The WTO's ruling General Council will take up the question on February 10 and 11.

US representatives in Geneva held out for more specific wording in a draft statement, which in its current form would apply to "public health problems ... especially those resulting from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics."

Washington feared that the formulation could allow drugs for non-infectious illnesses such as diabetes or asthma to be included under the new export regulations.

The expanded focus in the draft text, according to the United States, could allow wealthy countries to override a broad range of drug patents on such products as Viagra.

In Paris on Monday France's junior minister for foreign trade, Francois Loos, urged the United States to help overcome last week's setback in Geneva.

"The blockage by the United States comes as great progress had been accomplished," he said. "We cannot let this failure stand."

The renewed negotiations next year "will be a test of the willingness of the United States to play a real part in the Doha round," Loos said.

WTO ministers meeting in Qatari capital Doha in November 2001 agreed to launch a new round of global trade liberalization talks. At the same time they agreed in principle that the public health needs of impoverished nations battling epidemics should take precedence over patent rights held by big pharmaceutical companies.

In a related development, the humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) insisted that in the new talks "it is vital that the text does not limit the solution to certain diseases, as pushed for by the pharmaceutical industry and the United States."

MSF spokeswoman Ellen't Hoen added that "today, some AIDS patients in Malawi, Honduras or Cambodia can buy generic triple therapies that cost 300 dollars per patient per year because Indian and Thai producers are able to export them."

She warned that unless there was an agreement guaranteeing such export rights, "the source of affordable generics will dry up."

"In the future many patients will be excluded from access to life-saving treatment because they can't afford brand name drugs."

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