Lamy access-to-medicine plan under fire

Date: 16/01/03

By Karen Carstens

EU TRADE chief Pascal Lamy has been lambasted by developing countries and humanitarian aid campaigners over a scheme to provide cheap medicines to the world's poorest nations.

They claim that the French commissioner's proposal does not go far enough and panders to big pharmaceutical companies in the United States.

Lamy, who was seeking to salvage an access-to-medicines plan scuppered by the US in World Trade Organization (WTO) talks last month, put forward his compromise plan in a letter to WTO trade ministers last week.

As with the original idea, it would allow poor countries lacking their own production capacities to import "unauthorised" generic drugs for a limited list of diseases, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

But Lamy says that poor countries should also be able to import generic drugs for other diseases, on a case-by-case basis, where they are judged to constitute a "public health crisis" by the World Health Organization (WHO).

"When there's too much mistrust in the game then you have to call a third party, and the WHO is a trusted party," Lamy said.

Washington feared that the initial plan, proposed by Mexico's WTO presidency, would allow countries to begin producing cheap generic drugs for non-life-threatening ailments, ranging from headaches to impotency.

The US, home to the biggest pharmaceuticals industry in the world, insisted that any deal must be limited both in scope and duration.

"The US solution is not acceptable," Lamy said.

"Developing countries did not accept it and we can't either. It's unilateral and it's temporary, whereas we want a permanent multilateral solution."

Despite his efforts to find a middle way, Lamy's plan has come in for criticism from developing nations, including Kenya, and humanitarian aid group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

Ellen t' Hoen, coordinator of MSF's access-to-essential-medicines campaign, said Lamy was "sugar-coating the bitter pill with reference to the WHO" which was actually "not too keen" on taking on this new task.

Reaching some kind of WTO deal is, however, seen as vital if trade talks launched in Doha in 2001 are to progress by 2005, when they are due to finish.

Yet t' Hoen, who participated in the Doha talks, said there was no list of diseases at all in the original Doha Declaration, so the current debate is really "a step backward".

"Let countries decide what drugs they need for which disease," she said. "It's not up to the WTO, it's not up to the WHO and it's not up to Pascal Lamy to decide it."

Moreover, she said, both policymakers and drug companies would do well to focus more on actually developing drugs to fight the mostly tropical diseases on the proposed list, which include, among others, yellow fever, plague, cholera, African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), dengue (a mosquito-borne infection) and typhoid fever.

"It's quite cynical that there aren't even that many drugs available to fight the diseases recommended for the list," t' Hoen said, adding that developing treatments for tropical diseases which hardly occur in the northern hemisphere is unfortunately not a profitable prospect to drug firms.

EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy has been criticised by developing countries and humanitarian aid campaigners over a scheme to provide cheap medicines to the world's poorest nations.