World Trade Organization Agreement Appears Near

Officials attending the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Doha, Qatar, appear to be nearing an agreement on a new round of global trade talks. The meeting in the Persian Gulf emirate is aimed primarily at agreeing on an agenda for multiyear negotiations -- a list of issues that countries are willing to entertain at future meetings. Success on an agreement with this central goal is thought to indicate the credibility of the WTO as the rule-maker and dispute-settler of international commerce.

One strong indication that negotiators are near agreement was a tentative declaration aimed at ensuring the rights of poor nations to override drug company patents and obtain cheap medicine for combating diseases such as AIDS.

The document, criticized by the pharmaceutical industry and praised by activists, marks a breakthrough on an issue that threatened to derail the WTO meeting. Brazil and India had pressed for a declaration stating that nothing in the WTO's rules would prevent a country from taking measures to protect public health. That wording was strongly opposed by the United States, Switzerland and other nations with large drug industries on the grounds that it would create enormous exception to the international rights of drug patent holders.

But US negotiators dropped their insistence on much narrower language. The compromise document released Monday said, in its key paragraph, "We agree that the [WTO intellectual property] agreement does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health." It added, in a concession to Washington, that member countries reiterated their commitment to the WTO intellectual-property regime.

"This would have been unthinkable two years ago, and it shows how far the world has come," said Jamie Love, head of the Consumer Project on Technology, an advocate for easing drug patents. Love was disappointed, however, that the document did not explicitly solve the problem of ensuring that countries unable to produce generic drugs themselves can obtain them from other countries.

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