The EPA negotiations in different regions will, or are likely to, include liberalisation of trade and investment in services. Liberalisation of services can have far reaching consequences. Since Article 5 in the GATS requires that regional agreements have to have "substantial sectoral coverage" and eliminate "substantially all discrimination", many services sectors will be included in EPAs that liberalise services, even if Art.5 allows developing countries to liberalise less than developed countries in a free trade agreement. As this is done at the end of the EPA negotiation period, this is a dangerous process because experience has shown that if liberalisation of services is done too swiftly without the necessary assessments and regulations, there might be many negative consequences.
Health equity in economic and trade policies
There are acute disparities in pharmaceutical access between developing and industrialized countries. Developing countries make up approximately 80% of the world's population but only represent approximately 20% of global pharmaceutical consumption. Among the many barriers to drug access are the potential consequences of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement. Many developing countries have recently modified their patent laws to conform to the TRIPS standards, given the 2005 deadline for developing countries.
Headlining this quarter's HAI Africa network newsletter is a fact sheet about the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) amendment to the TRIPS agreement. WTO member states last year agreed to permanently adopt the "30 August 2003 Decision" as an amendment to TRIPS. This Amendment outlines the circumstances and procedures necessary for compulsory licensing in countries that do not have the capacity for pharmaceutical production. Access to medicines campaigners are denouncing the Amendment as an extraordinarily bad deal for poor countries, but representatives from the US, EU and pharmaceutical industry are, not surprisingly, welcoming it. This fact sheet gives an overview of the Amendment and why it is controversial. It's available on the HAI Africa web site.
International health and AIDS activists are up in arms over the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) pre-Hong Kong approval of a controversial amendment to its intellectual property agreement, saying it will limit access to affordable medicines for the neediest countries - those that have little or no pharmaceutical production base. Activists say the amendment, approved on 6 December, is proof that the WTO has ignored those with expertise on public health and intellectual property, and buckled under the pressure of big pharmaceutical companies, who supported the amendment.
The emergence of an increasingly global economy suggests that the ability of individual countries to shape their own destinies is becoming more difficult. International trends and pressures now influence national, and even local, health care policy making. Researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, together with Oxford University, looked at the effect of globalisation on health issues in South Africa and assessed its influence compared to national and local forces.
"Rather than being an important milestone towards the achievement of the much touted development round, Hong Kong has ended as a platform for anti-development outcomes. The declaration from the Hong Kong WTO Ministerial is a loss for African countries. They have been forced to concede on most of the positions with which they came to Hong Kong. And whatever comfort exists in the other areas is ambiguous at best, illusory at worst."
Health ministries around the world face a new challenge: to assess the risks and respond to the opportunities of the increasing openness in health services under the World Trade Organization's (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). International Trade in Health Services and the GATS addresses this challenge head-on by providing analytical tools to policymakers in health and trade ministries alike who are involved in the liberalization agenda and, specifically, in the GATS negotiations.
An AU Health Ministers meeting was held in Gaborone, Botswana 13-14 October 2005. On TRIPS, the final statement of the meeting said:
- UNDERTAKE to pursue, with the support of our partners, the local production of generic medicines on the continent and to making full use of the flexibilities in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) and the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health;
- CALL UPON our Ministers of Trade to seek a more appropriate permanent solution at the WTO that revises the TRIPS agreement and removes all constraints, including procedural requirements, relating to the export and import of generic medicines;
- CALL UPON Member States and Regional Economic Communities to ensure that TRIPS plus provisions which go beyond TRIPS obligations are not introduced in bilateral / regional trade agreements or in economic partnership agreements.
Campaigners from Southern Africa are bracing for the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks to be held in Hong Kong later this month. Some plan to send representatives to the meeting, to protest against unfair trade legislation – particularly as this relates to agriculture. These representatives will include two cotton farmers from Zimbabwe, says Ntando Ndlovu of the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) based in the capital, Harare.
"The two farmers will be in Hong Kong and make noise using anything, including the beating of drums," she told a gathering of Southern African activists this week at a conference held in the South African commercial hub of Johannesburg. Ndlovu also urged Mozambique and South Africa to send cotton farmers in support of their Zimbabwean counterparts.
The World Trade Organisation was supposed to conclude a ‘permanent solution’ to the problem facing countries that have no or inadequate drug manufacturing capacity so that they can have access to affordable medicines. The impasse that has taken place in the recent negotiations brings into focus the importance of the issue to the developing countries in the light of the global avian flu threat and the shortage of the anti viral drug to treat bird flu. This Third World Network web page includes a background note on the issue by Sangeetha Shashikant and the report on the talks by Martin Khor.