US and Europe have still not reached an agreement on the access to cheap medicines for the world’s poorest nations. During the negotiations, the US, home to the world’s largest pharma industry, insisted that any deal must be limited both in scope and duration. On this basis, the US has been acting unilaterally and using temporary and non-binding measures, while Europe has criticised this move and has issued an alternative proposal: multilateral and permanent.
As with the original DOHA document, the EU proposal would allow poor countries lacking their own production capacities to import ’unauthorised’ generic drugs for a limited list of diseases, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. But EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy says that poor countries should also be able to import generic drugs for other diseases, on a case-by-case basis, where they are judged to constitute a "public health crisis" by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Developing nations, including Kenya, and NGOs have attacked Lamy’s approach, calling it ’ambiguous’. They claim that the EU proposal does not go far enough and panders to big pharmaceutical companies in the United States.
Commissioner Lamy’s response to a letter from EPHA President Andrew Hayes states that "the situation now is that the US are not in the position to join the consensus around this text because it disagrees on the scope of diseases to be covered", but that "a permanent and secure solution must be found as soon as possible in the WTO".
http://www.europa.eu.int/rapid/start/cgi/guesten.ksh?p_action.gettxt=gt&doc=MEMO/03/4
