Global trade compromise on vaccines and food draws fire

A compromise deal was found to allow developing countries better access to vaccines. Keystone / Legnan Koula

The pharmaceutical industry and several NGOs have criticised deals on vaccines and food security made at a six-day meeting of the Geneva-based World Trade Organization (WTO).

The WTO’s 164 members agreed on a package of trade reforms in the early hours of Friday, which included compromise solutions on waiving intellectual property rights on Covid-19 vaccines and ensuring greater food security globally.

But the vaccine deal has drawn fire from both medicine manufacturers, who say the new rules will backfire by inhibiting innovation, and campaign groups who contend that reforms have not gone far enough.

NGOs say the partial IP waiver to allow developing countries to produce and export Covid-19 vaccines barely expands on an existing exemption in WTO rules and is too narrow by not covering therapeutics and diagnostics.

“Put simply, it is a technocratic fudge aimed at saving reputations, not lives,” said Max Lawson, co-chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance.

“It is useless to lift patents without revealing manufacturing secrets and transferring technology and know-how,” wrote Isolde Agazzi, international trade manager for the NGO Alliance Sud, in the Le Temps newspaper. “Alliance Sud, would have preferred no agreement at all rather than a bad agreement.”

But scienceindustries, the body representing the Swiss pharmaceutical, chemicals and life science industries, said the decision sends a “dangerous signal for future innovations”.

“The suspension of patent rights will not increase the vaccination rate in countries but will call into question the ability to develop new vaccines and medicines for future challenges.”

Food security

WTO members agreed on a package of measures, including an agreement to tear down export restrictions on the sale of food to the World Food Programme – but only if this doesn’t compromise the ability of individual countries to feed their own populations.

The WTO meeting also failed to make headway on proposed agricultural reforms, which Alliance Sud’s Agazzi says is vital to allow achieve long-term food self-sufficiency in developing countries.

The Swiss farmers’ union Uniterre was also unimpressed and called on the government to demand an “immediate suspension of all existing WTO rules that prevent countries from developing public food stocks and regulating the market and prices.”

But this seems unlikely as the Swiss government proclaimed its satisfaction with the results of the marathon WTO meeting. “In view of the current challenges facing the multilateral trading system” the package of new WTO measures “should be considered a success,” the government stated on Friday.