This presentation was given at the second meeting of the African Civil Society Coalition on the Intergovernmental Working Group in Arusha, Tanzania, 3-4 April 2008. It provides basic information on the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health (CIPIH), regarding its mandate and the implementation of its recommendations. One of these recommendations was to establish an intergovernmental working group (IGWG) to draw up a global strategy and plan of action in order to provide a medium-term framework based on the recommendations of the Commission. The aims of the strategy and plan of action are to secure an enhanced and financially sustainable basis for needs-driven, essential health research and development relevant to diseases that disproportionately affect developing countries.
Health equity in economic and trade policies
This document presents the first volume of results from a survey on the Paris Declaration. It provides an overview of the key findings across the 34 countries involved, as well as assessing the survey process and setting out key conclusions and recommendations. Key implications of the survey that are highlighted include higher expectation levels for reform, deeper ownership and more accountable institutions, and increasing aid efficiency together with donor harmonisation. The authors suggest that aid effectiveness issues and results need to be discussed more explicitly at country level, and credible monitoring mechanisms need to be developed. If countries and donors are to accelerate progress towards achieving the Paris Declaration commitments, it is recommended that: partner countries must deepen their ownership of the development process; donors need to support these efforts by making better use of partners' capacity; to further harmonisation, donors must work aggressively to reduce the transaction costs of delivering and managing aid; and to begin addressing mutual accountability commitments, countries and donors should clearly define a mutual action agenda.
Although the Swazi government has reaffirmed its commitment to the second phase of negotiations towards a full EPA (economic partnership agreement) with the European Union (EU), which relates to trade in services and investment, economists continue to argue that it will be detrimental to the domestic industry. Economist Thembinkosi Dlamini stated: “If one looks at the EPA for what it really is, it is clear that it wants those things that are under the Doha Development Agenda, that is, trade in services and investment as well as government procurement.” He said that Swaziland or the Southern African Development Community (SADC) would not be able to compete with a European company for trade in services.
Trade talks between the European Union and southern African countries have opened up serious differences between Europe and South Africa, and between South Africa and her neighbours. At the heart of the difficulties are the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) which countries of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) grouping are negotiating to get preferential access to European markets. A number of southern African countries have just signed an Interim EPA (IEPA) with Europe but South Africa has baulked at signing, threatening the future of the Southern African Customs Union – the world's oldest.Resolving the difficulties will require a lot of political will and sensitivity from both South Africa and the EU, writes AllAfrica guest columnist Nkululeko Khumalo of the South African Institute of International Affairs.
Developing country governments will struggle to invest in decent public health facilities when valuable resources are needed to service debt. However, the evidence is that debt relief works to alleviate healthcare shortages - spending on health in countries that have received debt cancellation has risen by seventy percent. The report calls for urgent action to ensure developing countries’ can provide adequate healthcare: rich countries, institutions and commercial creditors must cancel all illegitimate (i.e. due to ‘unfair or irresponsible’ lending) and unpayable debts being claimed from all poor countries, not just those eligible for the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative; creditors should recognise debtor governments’ accountability to their own citizens, and not impose economic policies through conditions on debt relief or loans. This includes conditions limiting public spending or specifying how healthcare should be delivered; and southern governments must abide by the demands of their citizens that funds from debt cancellation be used to improve essential public services – and the governments must be open and accountable to their people over the use and monitoring of these funds.
The paper argues that politics is central to aid effectiveness and the measures should be taken to ensure democratic ownership of citizens in recipient countries. It argues that aid must ensure mutual accountability between donors, government and citizens. Furthermore, donors need to ensure high standards of aid quality by fairly allocating aid toward poverty reduction, untying aid and limiting technical assistance, as well as ensuring predictability for recipient countries. The paper makes a number of recommendations ahead of the Accra High Level Forum on aid effectiveness, which include: donors should recognise the centrality of poverty reduction, equality and human rights; all donor-imposed policy conditionality should be ended; donors and Southern governments must adhere to the highest standards of openness and transparency; donors should recognise CSOs as development actors in their own right and acknowledge the conditions that enable them to play effective roles in development; an effective and relevant independent monitoring and evaluation system for the Paris Declaration and its impact on development outcomes should be developed; mutually agreed, transparent and binding contracts to govern aid relationships should be introduced; and new multi-stakeholder mechanisms for holding governments and donors to account should be created.
Intellectual property rights are affecting human rights in several areas such as public health, access to knowledge and agriculture, and human rights advocates have a decisive role to play to reverse the trend, according to members of a recent panel discussion on the negative impacts of intellectual property systems. The event organised on 13 March by the International Environmental Law Research Centre (IELRC) and 3D -> Trade - Human Rights - Equitable Economy in cooperation with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, brought together speakers whose primary aim was to provide entry points and opportunities for human rights advocates to challenge the current trend in intellectual property policy-making.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to reauthorize the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief at a cost of $50 billion over the next five years. No amendments were considered presently for the senate bill introduced by Sen. Biden of Delaware. Of the $50 billion, $4 billion would be allocated to tuberculosis programs and another $5 billion for malaria programs.
EU trade chief Peter Mandelson dangled a carrot in front of SA's negotiators at the weekend, hinting at greater access to European markets in exchange for SA returning to the negotiating table to resolve a standoff over a stalled regional trade deal with the EU. But his promises may not be enough to persuade SA. SA's chief trade negotiator, Xavier Carim, said that improved market access - evidently offered on agriculture, fisheries and industrial goods - did not ease concern that EU demands would limit SA's policy options.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has begun a scheme of tiered pricing of its medicines in low- and middle-income countries. The policy is being tested in India, South Africa and Morocco, to ensure the greatest availability of their products, while still recovering R&D costs from those who are able to pay.