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A potted history of patents and access to medicines at the World Trade Organisation

Back in 2001, 142 countries at the WTO summit in Doha, confirmed that governments should be free to take action to protect public health even if this means overriding the patent rights that big drug companies have on their medicines.

Thanks to this landmark agreement - the Doha Declaration on TRIPs and Public Health- poor country governments have the right to ask local companies to produce low cost versions of life saving medicines (called generics) if the drugs produced by the big pharmaceutical companies prove too expensive. See The Problem with Patents.

This was great news but for the majority of poor countries there was a important catch. While a government could ask companies in their own country to produce cheap generic medicines where the patented equivalent proved too expensive or was in limited supply, it was still illegal under WTO rules for other countries to export cheap generic drugs to them. This means the vast majority of poor countries, which don't have the capacity to develop and produce drugs in-country, will not be able to get access to affordable medicines .   

This should have been a purely technical matter and trade ministers committed themselves to find an early solution . However, thanks to a stubborn US government acting under the influence of a powerful drug company lobby, the talks were stuck in deadlock for months.

In  September 2003,  ahead of another WTO Meeting in Cancun, Mexico, and with developing countries under immense pressure to adopt a deal,  the WTO finally reached an agreement.

This agreement, though trumpeted as an 'historic' breakthrough by the WTO - is seriously flawed and does little to address the problems of access to affordable medicines faced by millions of sick people across the developing world.

Developing countries successfully stopped the US and the pharmaceutical lobby from excluding many important diseases of the third world from the deal, which is an important achievement.  However no matter how desperate the health need, a poor country without the capacity to produce a needed drug - which is virtually all of them - will have to ask another government to suspend the relevant patent and license a local company to produce and export it.

Few countries, if any, will be prepared to help other countries in this way, as it would provoke retaliation by the US, which fiercely defends the commercial interests of the drug companies.  What is more the agreement is wrapped in so much red tape and uncertainty that in practice it will be very difficult to use.

The bottom line is that many  poor countries will still have to pay the high price for patented medicines or most probably, doing without.  The World Trade Organisation has failed to live up to the Doha pledge to put people's health before profits. .
The campaign to cut the cost of vital medicines has achieved some great successes - but its clearly not over yet. Despite its flaws, Oxfam will now fight to ensure that developing countries can and do use this deal, so that poor people, where ever they live, can access affordable medicine when they are sick, whatever their illness, as intended by the Doha Declaration

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the problem with patents >