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Mr. Desmond Browne (Kilmarnock and Loudoun): I am grateful to my right. hon. and hon. Friends for paring their speeches to enable me to speak in this important debate.
In the time available before the replies, I should like to talk about one discrete but very important issue that is part of the in-built World Trade Organisation agenda--the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, and particularly the WTO agreement and trade rules on patents and poor people's access to drugs. Although my hon. Friends the Members for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock), for Walthamstow (Mr. Gerrard) and for Eastwood (Mr. Murphy) mentioned and made important points about TRIPS, I am interested in that one aspect of it.
The production and trading of pharmaceuticals is conducted according to TRIPS, which provides that the holder of product patents--usually the major international
drug companies--are allowed to set the product price in each country in which a patent is held, or to licence others to produce or market the product on an agreed basis.
The House will know--but it bears repeating--that as we approach the end of the 20th century, almost 34 million people world wide face human immune deficiency virus and an uncertain future in the shadow of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The fact is that 95 per cent. of those people live in the developing world and that percentage is likely to increase.
In some countries, one in four adults are HIV positive. In the five years between 2005 and 2010, life expectancy in the most severely affected countries, in southern Africa, is projected to drop by 14 years, from 59 to 45. Many countries in Asia are experiencing an explosive escalation in the numbers of people becoming infected with HIV. With half of all people who acquire HIV being children and young people under 25, AIDS strikes down some of the most productive members of those societies.
At a recent international conference in Malaysia, a senior World Bank economist warned that AIDS threatens to wipe out the last 20 years of economic gains. Yet the Nobel peace prize-winning organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres says that doctors in Kenya advise AIDS patients to save up for their funeral rather than for drugs which they will not be able to afford.
The current lack of access to HIV-AIDS care and treatment in developing countries is substantially a consequence of those countries' poverty, but it is also a consequence of the cost of medicines--which in turn is a consequence of the intellectual property rights attaching to those medicines.
International trade agreements and policies can and do affect access to goods and services that are crucial to HIV prevention, care and impact mitigation. In May 1999, the World Health Assembly unanimously passed a resolution calling on member states to
The examples are stark. Flucanozole--a drug that manages cryptococcal meningitis, which is an infection that affects one AIDS sufferer in five in Thailand--was supplied exclusively by the US company Pfizer until 1998. Since local alternatives became available, the cost of the daily dosage has fallen by 95 per cent. That represents a saving of £3 million to the Thai Government each year. The 75 cents daily cost in Thailand compares with $30 a day for patients in Kenya, where the number of children orphaned by AIDS has increased by nearly 200 per cent. over the past three years.
The TRIPS agreement allows for local production of patented medicines through compulsory licensing in cases of public health emergencies or unfair pricing. However, pharmaceutical companies in industrialised nations have
recently put considerable pressure on Governments not to allow compulsory licensing. In 1997, South Africa passed a medicines Act designed to enable poor people, particularly HIV sufferers, to gain access to affordable generic drugs. The law permits compulsory licensing and parallel imports, as well as encouraging generic substitution, but the US pharmaceutical industry and the US Government responded immediately, twisting the arm of the South African Government to change the law despite its compliance with the TRIPS agreement. They threatened South Africa with a case before the adjudication panel. Only in response to public protest in the US and the strong resistance of the South African Government did the US Government fortunately back down.
The European Union working paper circulated at the WTO contained the following statement of the law:
This may sound lame but, to conclude my micro-point, I should like my right hon. Friends to do everything they can to support the EU in enforcing the inflexible interpretation of TRIPS to enable access to cheap drugs.
On a more macro level, I want to make a plea for an intellectual property rights regime that reinforces and does not act against the development goals that we set inother international commitments. The United Nations international conference on population and development in Cairo, Egypt in September 1994 agreed the following objective:
Mr. Gary Streeter (South-West Devon):
Human beings have never been good at looking ahead and understanding our future. Almost every prediction of future trends or of how we will live tomorrow has been proved wrong by unforeseen events and unthought-of inventions and discoveries. This remains as true today--despite our science and technology--as it was in yesteryear.
As we peer around the corner to the 21st century, can anyone doubt that we are all in for a period of massive change? There will be change on a global scale, which will rival, and probably outstrip, the turmoil and upheaval of the industrial revolution of the 19th century and the technological advances of the twentieth.
Globalisation is changing everything. New technologies are changing everything. The knowledge and information revolution is changing everything. It is producing change at a pace and on a scale that has never happened in human experience before. The challenge for the politicians of the 21st century will be to understand and manage the implications for all of us--our constituents, national sovereignty and global political structures--of all the changes.
That is the global backdrop against which we come to this important and interesting debate on the world trade talks in Seattle. Most people who have spoken in the debate support free trade. The debate on the benefits of free trade--as on liberal capitalism--is largely behind us. The Secretary of State made a strong speech in Seattle in support of free trade--a speech which, perhaps, she could not have made a year or two ago. I may be wrong on that.
It was interesting to hear some Labour Members giving speeches which appeared not to support free trade, and which harked back to a bygone era. They were wishing the ends without willing the means in their passionate advocacy of protectionism. It was interesting to hear old Labour's revenge in the debate. The speeches were interesting, but did not address the real world in which we live.
No one is saying that free trade of itself will bring about all the changes that we wish to see, both here and in the developing world. We should not forget that the Secretary of State spends most of her time focusing on thingssuch as good governance, civil society, support for entrepreneurs in the developing world, promotion of democracy and many other ways of producing economic growth, stimulating businesses and helping the developing world. The process is not just about free trade, but free trade is a vital backdrop to our discussions about how best to help people who live in abject poverty.
"explore and review their options under international agreements, including trade agreements, to safeguard access to essential drugs".
By manufacturing drugs within the developing world, it is possible to provide them to local people at much more affordable rates than if those people are forced to pay the global price set by western producers who hold the patent. If the drugs are not provided cheaply from local production, they are certain to be out of the price range of local people. Generic drugs made locally are about 70 to 90 per cent. cheaper, according to Medecins Sans Frontieres; in some cases, they can be 200 to 300 per cent. cheaper than branded equivalents available in the west.
"The TRIPS Agreement, and in particular Article 31, shall be understood to permit developing countries to issue, in accordance with the provisions laid down in this article and other relevant articles, compulsory licenses for drugs appearing on the list of essential drugs of the World Health Organisation."
Despite that, there was pressure within the EU delegation from sources that represented the pharmaceutical industry to have that paragraph removed from the document.
"To increase the accessibility, availability, acceptability and affordability of health care services and facilities to all people in accordance with national commitments to provide access to basic health care for all."
It also agreed the following action:
"Through technology transfer, developing countries should be assisted in building their capacity to produce generic drugs for the domestic market and to ensure the wide availability and accessibility of such drugs."
Paragraph 35 of section C of the declaration of the UN world summit for social development in Copenhagen in 1995 says:
"Governments in partnership with all other development actors in particular organisations of and for people living in poverty should co-operate to meet the basic human needs of all, including people living in poverty and vulnerable groups by:
Paragraph 37 goes on to say:
Ensuring universal access to basic social services".
"Access to social services for people living in poverty and vulnerable groups should be improved through:
The UN convention on the rights of the child sets out requirements and articles for preventable or treatable diseases and goes on to say that children faced with diseases and the spectre of HIV and AIDS ought to have access to the essential drugs. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's international
development targets were set out in the wonderful White Paper that the Department for International Development published within a month of Labour coming to office.
Ensuring that low income communities have access to health service outlets staffed by health workers who can provide primary care, essential drugs and information."
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