All of a sudden international institutions are taking center stage. Just today the the Bush administration is finally taking the UN's peacekeeping and nation building expertise seriously. But the WTO talks next week in Cancun may be an even bigger deal.
Last week, the WTO struck a mighty blow against the pharmaceutical industry (and their main lobbyist, the Bush administration) by reducing patent restrictions on drug production for third world countries. This means third world "customers" who weren't able to purchase lifesaving drugs before can now get the drugs from generic producers in India and Brazil. While this might seem like a raw deal for Americans, who fund pharmaceutical research either through increased prescription drug costs or inflated insurance premiums, the fact is patients in the third world weren't able to buy the drugs at all before, so it shouldn't affect revenues. The problems now will revolve around enforcement - how do you stop rich Americans and Europeans from obtaining the cheap, generic versions? You need a central trade authority with teeth.
Talks next week should revolve around the much bigger issue of agricultural subsidies. For all the Bush administration's talk about free trade, there just hasn't been any movement on agriculture, which is really the dark center of American protectionism.
Developing countries argue that the more than US$300 billion spent each year by industrialized countries to help their domestic food producers prevents them competing on developed markets, but also on their home market.I guess I'm pretty skeptical about the OECD countries yielding any ground - domestic political concerns, you know - but the decision on drug patents is glimmer of hope. These kinds of successes bring more prestige to the WTO's multilateral approach, which means more authority for international institutions."For us to have sustainable food security we have to be able to produce. The dumping of uncompetitive, subsidized agricultural produce has stolen our incentive to produce by denying us access to markets," Mohamed said.
Subsidies paid by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries per capita for cows and cotton bolls are "considerably higher" than OECD per capita aid for sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN Development Programme's Human Development Report last year.
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