Progress in Doubt on Drug Patents at World Trade Organization Summit

Despite optimistic talk from drug-producing countries such as the United States, skepticism runs high that the 144 countries of the World Trade Organization can reach a compromise to provide poor countries with access to inexpensive drugs during the WTO summit this week in Sydney, Australia. Trade ministers called a "mini-ministerial," beginning tonight and running through tomorrow, to iron out several issues that threaten to hold up the Sydney talks. A patent compromise has dogged the WTO for years. Failure to cut a deal this year will slow progress on the overall trade talks, which are supposed to wrap up by 2005.

Trade ministers agreed last year that poorer countries facing serious health threats should be allowed to bypass international drug patents by buying generic copies from manufacturers in other countries. That agreement was critical to launching the latest round of global trade talks, but ministers left the details to be hammered out by the end of this year.

The EU and US patent proposals would limit patent-breaching production to drugs needed to fight epidemics such as AIDS and malaria, for only the poorer developing countries, with strict limits on which countries could produce the generics. Developing countries want access to a wider range of drugs, while a large coalition of NGOs is pushing to allow any poorer country to contract for delivery of patented medicines from whomever it chooses.

"This is nowhere near close to a breakthrough," said Ellen 't Hoen, who leads the drug access campaign for Doctors Without Borders. Success at the summit, a US trade official said, will depend "on whether people want to find a practical solution or one that would undermine the WTO's agreement on intellectual property rights." US pharmaceutical companies have fought hard to keep a WTO generic drug agreement as limited as possible, fearing a wave of patent infringements that could result in patented drugs washing back into Europe or North America from developing countries.

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