Canada and the United States are shying away from supporting a new European initiative to give poor countries better access to cheap medicines for AIDS and other deadly epidemics.
The European Union asked members of the World Trade Organization this week to agree to relax rules so that poor countries in public-health crises would be allowed to ignore patent protections.
But while the EU proposal aims to strike a middle ground between the needs of developing countries and multinational pharmaceutical companies, both the United States and Canada were reluctant to lend their support.
Patent rules are just fine the way they are now, said Sébastien Théberge, spokesman for Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew. "The TRIPS [trade-related intellectual property rights]agreement at this time provides sufficient flexibility in the AIDS crisis," he said.
Any changes to patent-protection rules at the WTO would imperil drug companies' ability to conduct groundbreaking research and development, the United States and Canada argue.
Such a position "is not the Canadian way," retorted Liberal MP Dan McTeague, who has been lobbying his own party and government to make changes such as those proposed by the European Union.
"These figures -- trade surpluses, trade deficits -- mean nothing to people who are dead."
In its proposal this week, the EU asked WTO members to agree to "clarify" existing patent rules so that needy countries would find it easier to have access to life-saving drugs.
"Whilst we acknowledge that patents are essential to encourage investment in the development of new medicines, we need to interpret and apply the rules in such a way as to support developing countries in their battle against killer diseases," said EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy.
"These matters are too important to be left to the whim of lawyers."
Specifically, the EU wants the rules to say that a poor country in the midst of a public-health crisis should be able to import necessary drugs patent-free -- in other words, at a much lower price than normal. Right now, the rules allow countries in crisis to ignore patents only if they produce the drugs within their own borders.
A clarification of the TRIPS agreement is all that's needed to allow the intellectual-property regime to take public-health concerns into account, the EU said.
"It absolutely makes sense," Mr. McTeague said.
"To do anything else would be inhumane."
But the Canadian government, Canada's brand-name pharmaceutical industry, and the pharmaceutical industry worldwide argue that if developing countries want companies to invest in illness-curing drugs, the stiff patent structure must remain intact so that companies find it profitable to do the research.
Even in Third World cases where life-saving drugs are sold cheaply or even given away for free, the death toll is enormous and not improving, said Harvey Bale, the Geneva-based director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations.
That's because many countries are missing the infrastructure, the political attention to public health, and the funding to make sure people with serious illnesses such as AIDS and malaria are treated, he said.
Instead, IFPMA would rather see initiatives such as the global AIDS fund that the United Nations General Assembly is expected to discuss next week.
The Group of Eight powerful countries, meeting next month in Italy, are expected to commit donations of up to $2-billion (U.S.) a year toward such a fund.
A new study this week estimated that $26-billion (U.S.) will be needed by 2005 to control the HIV-AIDS epidemic.
But for Mr. McTeague, who says he has caught the attention of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Mr. Pettigrew with his arguments and won the support of many Liberal caucus members, money is not the right answer to solve the problem.
"The public is seeing it from a very different perspective," he said yesterday.
"It's an indirect subsidy for drug-patent holders."