World Trade Organization
A Mexican Mistake?
IPN Opinion article
A year and a half ago in Doha, Qatar, long before it became the center of the Iraqi war effort, the war on AIDS was supposed to be re-charged by the World Trade Organization. At the Doha WTO Ministerial meeting an agreement was reached permitting poor countries to disregard patent protections for drugs designed to treat diseases that posed a special burden, an \"emergency\", on those impoverished societies. What the ministers had in mind in allowing the compulsory licensing of drugs was improving access to treatments for malaria and AIDS in countries like Benin and Botswana that have been hit hardest by disease epidemics. But instead the Doha declaration, as it is now known, has been used by mid-income countries such as Egypt and Peru for improving access to lifestyle drugs like Viagra.
More than medicines
IPN Opinion article
We now have a solution to the intellectual property and access to medicines impasse that has consumed the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations for the past year. It is a solution we should have arrived at in December of 2002.
Yet regardless of what is on paper, the solution is not going to improve health outcomes in developing countries, which are more a question of preventive measures like sanitation, clean drinking water, and sewage treatment than curative treatments.
Curative treatments are also important, but must also depend on delivery and improved governance
Patents are not the problem with drugs access
IPN Opinion article
Letter to the editor of the Financial Times regarding \"WTO pact on generic drugs blocked by US\" (December 21)
The Poverty Industry
IPN Opinion article
The just concluded World Trade Organization informal mini ministerial meeting in Sydney Australia brought to the fore the fact that poverty has turned into an industry that is here to stay. Non governmental organizations based in the developed countries but working in developing countries focused on fighting for the poor to access medicines, street demonstrations on behalf of the poor led to a $A 500 million spending on security alone. Must Africa remain a beggar?
Protesters\' circus act past its use-by date
IPN Opinion article
Protesters against the World Trade Organisation will have to come up with some new tricks soon. Puny uni students named \"Jonny\" wearing balaclavas and clutching Molotov bongs just won\'t cut it any more. Wrestling police, throwing marbles at horses and vandalising McDonald\'s stores is becoming ayawn.
The media attention span is short and the protesters have been singing their tired old tunes for too long now. We will drop them as suddenly as we picked them up.
After three years in the media glare, WTO protests are in danger of becoming passe. The time has arrived for the other side to be heard.
And that is why a smiling Indian engineer named Barun Mitra was in Martin Place last week, moving among the protesters, asking them about GM crops and if they really supported Saddam Hussein.
The developing world needs trade, not aid, to help the poor
IPN Opinion article
Guilt and goodwill have blinded many to the damage that aid can do. Trade, not aid, is the solution for the poor. At this week\'s informal WTO ministerial meeting in Sydney, trade ministers should make good on their promise at Doha to create a world trading system that benefits all participants. That means reducing tariff and non-tariff barriers on all goods, as well as reducing agricultural subsidies.
World\'s poor at the mercy of Europe
IPN Opinion article
LATER this week in Sydney, trade ministers from 25 member nations of the World Trade Organisation and its new director-general Supachai Panitchpakdi will be hunkered down behind police barriers at Homebush to discuss the progress of the Doha round of world trade liberalisation. They are probably wasting their time.
The threat to Doha will not be the howling anti-globalisation mob outside, although they show a completely immoral lack of concern for the world\'s poor. The real enemy is within. It is the European Union, represented this week by trade commissioner Pascal Lamy.
EU poses a threat to WTO
IPN Opinion article
The main threat to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) comes from the European Union (EU) which is trying to turn the multilateral trade organisation into a regulatory authority on the lines of the EU.
Delivering a lecture on globalisation, WTO and the new round here on Thursday, Dr Razeen Sally, senior lecturer in international political economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science said that the new issues which the EU tried to thrust upon World Trade Organisation during the Doha ministerial meet, including environment, were on the lines of the regulatory mechanism followed by the EU.
Developing countries in the WTO
IPN Opinion article
Developing countries comprise of three quarters of the World Trade Organization membership and will play a major role in the success in the next round of talks.' Our strength so far is in numbers,' observed Margaret Chemengich head of the Kenyan delegation in Sydney. The world trade body sets rules and promotes market access and operates on the principle of non-discrimination. The world economy is fragile and its believed that by bringing issues that concern the poor countries on board it can help make the next round of talks succeed.
