TRIPS: protecting intellectual property or putting profits before people?

Consumers International, the umbrella body of the world’s consumer organisations, in a position paper published before the Seattle WTO Ministerial Conference, stated, "Public health measures are threatened by the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement and called on the WTO members:

• To reaffirm the primacy of public health interests over commercial consideration; and
• To actively support the flexibility allowed in the TRIPS Agreement to enable access to essential drugs."

Many people would argue that the monopoly and intellectual property rights given to pharmaceutical companies has gone much too far – now putting profit well before people.

There are good reasons for wanting to ensure that pharmaceutical companies do have profits and resources available – they engage in much of the research that develops new products (although a lot of that money is public money as well which should be taken into account). Nor is it a satisfactory argument - in fact it’s quite perverse - to argue that giving manufacturers monopoly rights to recoup some of their R & D costs can be done at the cost of denying access to drugs to millions of people. Better solutions than this need to be found. The pharmaceutical manufacturers have done no good to their public image in suing South Africa - and signalling clearly to world’s consumers that their bottom lines matter more to them than anything else.

More information on this issue can be found by accessing the Consumers International site (www.consumersinternational.org), the Public Citizen site which works extensively on this issue (www.cptech.org), and the site of Medicins Sans Frontieres (www.msf.org).