'Give trade a human face’ says PHA - Health is not up for sale !
- Press Releases
PRESS RELEASE - December 7,
2000
`Give trade a human face’ says PHA
Health is not up for sale !
After the World Bank it was the turn of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to come under
fire at the People’s Health Assembly on Thursday as a panel of speakers and delegates
denounced the conversion of health into a mere commodity.
“Our aim should be not only fair trade, but trade with a human face” said Abdul
Jalil, Minister of Commerce, Bangladesh who spoke on the implications of the WTO for
health. The Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which
comes under the purview of the WTO, he said is ‘ likely to have an adverse impact on
public health programmes by making medicines costlier and unaffordable by the poor
masses”
Mr Jalil called for amendments to the TRIPs Agreement relating to patents for
pharmaceutical products and chemicals to ensure the welfare of the common masses. “In
all future rounds of negotiations under WTO, it should be our overriding endeavour to make
the benefits of modern research available for good of the common man”, the Minister
said.
Mike Rowson of Med Act, United Kingdom criticized the way serious public health issues
were being decided by trade bodies like the WTO. The WTO he said did not have any defined
policy on public health and treated health as part of any other `service industry’.
“The dispute settlement body in the WTO operates behind closed doors and is comprised
of trade administrators and lawyers” he said pointing to the undemocratic way in
which the concerns of a majority of people was being ignored.
Speaking in the same forum Dr Zafar Mirza of the Network for Consumer Protection in
Pakistan said that the TRIPS agreement, with its provisions for protection of patents for
both products and manufacturing processes, would result in essential drugs becoming
unaffordable to the poor. Already he said many important drugs like those used for the
treatment of HIV/AIDS were way beyond the reach of most people in the developing world.
“ According to the WHO in the last 20 years at least 30 new diseases have emerged for
which there is no medication and when the drugs for these emerge they will be too costly
for the people who most need them” Dr Zafar said. He however pointed out that there
was a provision within the TRIPS agreement to enforce compulsory licensing of essential
drugs but attempts to take advantage of this clause were being strongly opposed by Western
governments.
Speaking in the morning session on `Environment and Survival’ Dr Rosalie
Bertell,
well known anti-nuclear campaigner from Canada warned that the militaries around the world
had changed its earlier role of safeguarding national sovereignty and were now acting as a
protector of the overseas investment. According to her with globalisation of the world
economy individual national armies should have been done away with but now they had taken
on a new purpose. “ The military is the real strength behind the multinationals”
Dr Bertell said. The arms race around the world and nuclear testing in particular she said
was having an extremely harmful effect on global ecology.
