In response to the Medicine Patent Pool Foundation’s (MPPF) first voluntary license agreement with pharmaceutical giant, Gilead, the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC) and the Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge – both aiming to secure universal access to medicines – called for a meeting with the MPPF, arguing that the agreement represented a setback for universal access. On 2 October 2011, both organisations and members from civil society from the global south met with MPPF and UNITAID in Geneva, and made three demands. First, the agreement with Gilead should be substantially revised or terminated, given Gilead’s bad faith and the controversial terms of the agreement. Second, MPPF should institute an immediate moratorium on negotiations of any new licence agreements with multinational drug companies until such time as standard terms and conditions or a model agreement is agreed to. Third, the current structure of the MPPF needs to be revised, including its governance and administration, goals and mission, and comprehensive reforms must be implemented that are designed to enhance its transparency, accountability and adherence to core principles of health equity.
Health equity in economic and trade policies
From 19-21 September 2011, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) hosted Public Forum 2011, where non-profit organisations Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and IQsensato held a joint panel session on a proposal to the WTO entitled ‘An Agreement on the Supply of Knowledge as a Global Public Good’. The session provided a space to debate the feasibility of adding the supply of public goods involving knowledge as a new category in negotiated binding commitments in international trade. Proposal advocates argue that in the wake of current high levels of knowledge protection in the form of patents, the global community faces an under-supply of public goods, including knowledge. Opening up knowledge as a public good would include developing nations that have hitherto been increasingly excluded from accessing knowledge which has been patented by multinationals and developed nations. Options include collaborative funding of inducement prizes to reward open source innovation in areas of climate change, sustainable agriculture and medicine, and agreements to fund biomedical research in areas such as new antibiotics, avian influenza and the development of an AIDS vaccine.
Aid for trade (AfT) has proved to be largely ineffective in Malawi because it has had limited success in developing the local human and institutional capacity required to enable trade, according to this article. A key contributor to this has been a failure by trade promoters and external funders to identify where Malawi stands on its development curve. AfT solutions have tended to assume that Malawi is on the same point on its development curve as Cambodia, Vietnam, Ghana or Rwanda. Yet Malawi simply does not have the scale of human capacity that is required to ensure a pro-poor business environment. It lacks the capacity to ensure businesses have affordable access to finance, business development services, inputs, information, markets, labour and technology. The core problem is that civil society, government and the development community have not adequately recognised the roles that development and trade play in their poverty reduction objectives, the author concludes.
At the BRIC Health Minister’s meeting, held on 11 July 2011 in Beijing, the theme was access to medicine, framed by the Beijing Declaration’s affirmation of the importance of technology transfer among the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and the critical role of generic medicines in expanding access to antiretroviral medicines for all. The Health Ministers agreed to establish and encourage a global health agenda to promote innovation and universal access to affordable medicines, vaccines and other health technologies with assured quality, in support of reaching the MDGs and meeting other public health challenges. A powerful alliance could be expected on increasing access to new and innovative antiretroviral therapies (ART) for HIV and AIDS, and developing additional diagnostic tools and treatment for tuberculosis (TB), malaria as well as the neglected diseases. While committed to supporting the TRIPs safeguards and the Doha declaration on TRIPs, the BRICS countries are also determined to ensure that international trade agreements do not undermine TRIPs flexibilities, so as to ensure the sustainable delivery of low-cost quality medicines to low- and middle-income countries.
Kenya is allegedly among the top ten developing countries in terms of revenue lost to the European Union and the United States. But what can be done? The author of this article makes a number of recommendations. At national level, he urges the Kenyan government to implement reforms to tax policy, trade policy, customs and laws and to promote inclusive growth. To make this work, he calls for both political will and active civil society participation. He calls on government to change the law to insist on maximum transparency for all international transactions, and for banks to give full disclosure to tax and relevant national authorities. The author argues for using the price filter model used by the United States Customs to monitor trade misinvoicing. The best solution, he notes, will be an international agreement for automatic exchange of tax information globally. In the meantime, he argues for Kenya to sign bilateral information exchange agreements with the major tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, to be given information on accounts and companies registered in these jurisdictions that trade and do business with Kenya. He also argues for government to require all transnational companies to publish every year Kenya-specific accounts showing the profits or losses they make. Finally, he argues that Kenya follow the lead of Nigeria, which has sued major international companies for corruption and has been compensated through out-of-court settlements.
Universal access to medicines was a key topic of discussion at a meeting on 11 July 2011 of health ministers from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) in Beijing, China. The meeting, hosted by the Government of China, aimed to identify opportunities for BRICS countries to promote wider access to affordable, quality-assured medicines, with a view to reaching the Millennium Development Goals and other public health challenges. A ‘Beijing Declaration,’ issued on 11 July and signed by ministers of health from the five BRICS countries, underscored the importance of technology transfer among the BRICS countries, as well as with other developing countries, to enhance their capacity to produce affordable medicines and commodities. The Declaration also emphasised the critical role of generic medicines in expanding access to antiretroviral medicines for all. By signing the Declaration, leaders committed to working together to preserve the provisions contained in the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health—provisions that allow for countries to overcome intellectual property rights restrictions on medicines in the interest of public health. The five BRICS countries face similar health challenges, including a double burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases, inequitable access to health services and growing health care costs. Through collective action and influence, the BRICS coalition promises to deliver cost-effective, equitable and sustainable solutions for global health.
The Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the European Union (EU) and regions of African, Caribbean and Pacific states (ACP) are designed to encourage regional integration and improve trade capacity building and other aid interventions into the developing partner regions. The agreements cover not only trade in goods but also in services and other trade-related areas including intellectual property rights, which affect the production and availability of cheaper generic medicines for developing countries. The objective of this paper is to analyse why the trade and cooperation discussions with the EU have not made further progress towards the objective of African regional integration. This paper first presents an overview of the EPAs negotiations and outlines the main debates about EPAs. It then looks into regional integration in sub-Saharan Africa. It goes on to describe the precise integration objective associated with EPAs and how results have generally been disappointing in meeting the objective of furthering regional integration. The conclusion proposes recommendations on how to boost the negotiation process.
In this article, the author considers ways in which multinational companies avoid paying taxes in Africa, thereby undermining government commitments to education, housing and health, among others. The predominant way in which capital is hidden in trade and moved abroad is argued to be through the pricing of imports and exports. While a wide range of actors are argued to use this strategy, the author argues that multinational companies are more easily able to do so as they operate through subsidiaries scattered across the world, and have multiple subsidiaries, with trading between and among subsidiaries of multinational companies comprising as much as 60% of global trade. This gives significant scope for the use of transfer pricing.
The Society for International Development (SID)'s triennial World Congress, which concluded on 31 July 2011 in Washington, United States, drew over 1,000 attendees. According to the United Nations Development Programme, which attended the event, the emergence of new paths to development has grown along with the rise of middle- and low-income countries. However much of this growth has not been inclusive. A spokesperson for the UN Development Programme noted at the meeting that the empowerment of women was essential to the solid development of global international economies, a sentiment echoed by many others at the congress. Although 40% of participants were from the global South, one of the speakers, Sanjay Reddy expressed disappointment that the meeting was dominated by Northern development professionals, in particular those who appear to be engaged in for- profit contracting to execute development projects on behalf of organisations such as USAID. Reddy added that, if genuine grassroots development were to take place, SID should return to its original role of facilitating discussions between diverse groups, including voices that call for radically alternative methods to the current neoliberal agenda.
Members of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group and the European Union (EU) met on 31 May 2011 in Brussels, Belgium to continue ongoing negotiations on Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA). The ACP Ministers re-iterated their request for more flexibility on the part of the EU, including trade in medicines, and called for the reinforcement of the development components of EPAs. They also called for regional integration initiatives to be given precedence and for the preferential market access currently being provided under the EU’s EPA Market Access Regulation to be maintained and extended to other ACP countries until negotiations are concluded. In contrast, the EU Commissioner warned that the market access provided since 2007 to ACP countries that concluded EPA negotiations is temporary and predicated upon implementation of EPAs by ACP countries. He also announced that, owing to prolonged delays and stalemates in the negotiations, by the end of 2011 both parties will have to assess whether concluding negotiations is actually feasible within a realistic timeframe.