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(September 13, 2003--Cancun) Just two weeks after a compromise deal on
generic drug access for
countries with insufficient manufacturing capacity was reached at the
WTO,
significant conflicts over which countries can qualify to use the
agreement have emerged, according to AIDS activists who have been critical
of the terms of the deal.
At the direction of pharmaceutical companies, USTR Zoellick is pressuring
poor countries that have some domestic manufacturing capacity to opt out
of importing generic medicines under the agreement, even if manufacturing
capacity in these countries is too limited to result in broad access to
lowest cost medicines.
However, during an NGO briefing on September 12 EU Commissioner Lamy said
that he did not share the USs view that countries should be excluded if
they have some local production capacity. This clash between the US and
the EU is over interpretation of a fundamental aspect of the
agreement over which countries are allowed to use it.
The US has been pressuring countries to opt out of the deal because the
US
claims they have sufficient domestic capacity. In the most recent case,
USTR Zoellick has aggressively lobbied the Philippines not to import
generic medicines. Bullying countries to exclude themselves from this
deal
when millions of lives are at stake is unacceptable, said Sharonann Lynch
of Health GAP. Countries must be permitted to determine independently
whether or not they want to import or export under this deal.
The USs narrow interpretation of insufficient capacity contradicts basic
economic principles about how to achieve reductions in medicine prices.
The US government acknowledged this in a recent State Department cable
from an American Embassy to Washington D.C.: large economies of scale
in
the [pharmaceutical] industry are the norm andsmall production runs would
tend to raise prices, not lower them (July 1999).
Bob Zoellick understands how economies of scale work. But the USTR is
refusing to accept a rational, economically viable solution because that
would support generic competitionand the pharmaceutical industry will
not
permit that to happenno matter how great the human consequences, said
Asia
Russell of Health GAP.
The schizophrenic interpretation by the US and the EU reveals that this
solution was designed to give the illusion of consensus and not to tackle
the problem of developing countries lack of access to medicines, said
Gaelle Krikorian of Act Up-Paris. Their rush to get this issue off the
table before the Cancun Ministerial has resulted in a solution that was
never designed to work.
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