Inter Press Service - July 20, 2007
David Cronin

In 2003, the EU helped broker a temporary waiver to the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) agreement on intellectual property rights, which is known by the acronym TRIPS. The waiver was designed to allow poor countries lacking production capacity to address public health emergencies by importing cheap generic versions of patented drugs produced under a compulsory licence.

Four years later, the EU's executive, the European Commission, and many of its member governments are intent on ratifying a protocol amending TRIPS in order to make the waiver permanent. Meeting Jul. 17, however, the European Parliament's committee on international trade decided to delay giving its assent to ratification because it is not satisfied that the EU is doing enough to boost the supply of vital drugs to the needy.

As not one poor country has invoked the waiver, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) complain that it has proven too complex and ineffective. On Jul. 19, however, the WTO announced that Rwanda had become the first country to announce that it intends to make use of the waiver.

French Socialist MEP Kader Arif said that the trade committee will need a "solemn undertaking" from the Commission and EU governments "that Europe will be actively involved in finding new solutions."

"In line with the public's wishes, the EU should aim to be a world leader in the effort to make affordable medicines available throughout the world," he added. "This is about far more than simple ratification of an international protocol. It's about a political and humanitarian problem on a huge scale, the response to which requires real political will. We call upon the Commission to come forward with urgent alternative measures aimed at helping developing countries develop their own production capacity for pharmaceutical products."

The stance taken by MEPs could jeopardise the future of the protocol. It requires rubber-stamping by two-thirds of the WTO's 15 members by Dec. 1 if it is to enter into force. The United States, India, El Salvador, South Korea, Norway and the Philippines are the only countries to have ratified it so far.

MEPs say they are unhappy with responses to questions they have put to the Commission and to Portugal, the current holder of the Union's presidency.

Speaking in Strasbourg, France, on Jul. 11, Olli Rehn, a member of the European Commission, called on pharmaceutical companies to use a system known as tiered pricing to sell drugs cheaper in poor countries than in wealthier ones. Some MEPs argued that his expectation that companies would be willing to forfeit profits in that way indicated that the Commission was not serious about finding a solution to the scarcity of affordable medicines for major killers such as AIDS.

The following day, Parliament approved a motion that held intellectual property rules partly responsible for that scarcity. The motion said that before TRIPS entered into force in 1994, the ability of some middle-income countries to produce low-cost generic versions of patented medicines increased, and even highly impoverished states were able to import such drugs, irrespective of whether they had been patented.

Alexandra Heumber, a campaigner with the Brussels office of humanitarian group M decins Sans Fronti res (MSF), complained that Rehn had simply given examples of how the EU is funding research into possible new treatments for diseases, rather than addressing how patents can hinder poor people's access to medicines.

"We need strong action and strong commitments, not a list of what has already been done," Heumber told IPS.

She also berated the Commission and EU governments for not pledging to support what she called "innovative solutions" aimed at "de-linking" the cost of research and development into new drugs and their final price once they go on the market.

One such measure could be the use of 'patent pools'. Under that system, patent holders would agree to combine their patents and licence them to one another or to third parties. Such pooling of patents is already common in technology -- if, for example, common standards are required for radios, DVDs or for audio and video files on the Internet.

In December last year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a report of its Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health (CIPH).

It concluded that patents are being used to keep medicines out of the reach of the poor and, without greater clarity on some of the surrounding issues, this situation will persist. Patent pools could help provide the necessary clarity and drive down the prices of medicines, it added.

A separate WHO working group on intellectual property is exploring if that organisation could host an international patent pool system, under which agreements would be negotiated between pharmaceutical firms and governments in poor countries.

Heumber urged, too, that the EU institutions pay greater heed to the need for 'second-line' treatments. These are especially relevant to diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis, where patients have been found to have built up resistance to their current treatments.

MSF has reported that 20 percent of patients at its AIDS treatment project in Khayelitsha township near Cape Town, South Africa, have to switch to a second-line treatment after five years of taking the drugs previously prescribed to them. Yet most of the new treatments have either been unavailable or too expensive.

Harvey Bale, director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, claimed that the patent system is driving the development of new drugs.

"TRIPS is going to revolutionise the range of medicines available to poor and to rich people," he said. "There will be enormous positive benefits to the developing world."

But Celine Charveriat, head of Oxfam's advocacy office in Geneva, said that there has been no significant increase into research aimed at finding cures to diseases primarily affecting the poor since TRIPS came into effect.

"The TRIPS agreement does not strike the right balance between the rights of patent holders and the rights of communities," she argued. "The biggest losers of this imbalance are hundreds of millions of poor people. The agreement has done nothing to make medicines more affordable and more accessible."

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