Copyright 2000 The Washington Post
The Washington
Post
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May 6, 2000, Saturday, Final Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A18
LENGTH: 430 words
HEADLINE:
Good Deals for Africa
BODY:
AFTER YEARS of delay, Congress seems to have settled on a
trade deal for Africa and the Caribbean. In symbolic terms,
this is good news: A string of defeats on trade including the administration's
failure to get fast track negotiating authority from Congress has been broken.
In substantive terms, the bill is positive too. True, it contains some
restrictions that mock the ideal of free trade: The Caribbean can export more
clothes, but they have to be made with American materials;
Africa can export more, too, but its share of America's total
clothing imports is capped. Still, modest trade concessions are better than
none. And some of the more egregious protectionist clauses were dropped from the
bill at the last moment.
That said, the final horse-trading brought some
bad news too. The pharmaceutical industry succeeded in blocking a measure that
would have eased the delivery of AIDS drugs to developing
countries. The amendment would have codified in law two policies adopted by the
administration last year. The first allows AIDS-stricken
developing countries to buy drugs from the cheapest source, rather than from the
firm that invented them. The second allows these countries to license local
factories to make cheap copies of drugs and pay a nominal royalty to the
inventor.
The pharmaceutical firms object to this erosion of their
intellectual property. They are right that in the absence of an
intellectual property regime, innovation would dry up and
everyone would suffer. Moreover, it is not just rich countries that have a stake
in protecting the value of ideas. Developing countries such as India, which has
burgeoning software and movie industries, need intellectual
property law also.
Nonetheless, the pharmaceutical firms ought
to concede that AIDS is an exceptional disease and that this
justifies a limited weakening of intellectual property rules
that does not compromise the larger framework of regulation. One pharmaceutical
firm, Pfizer, has in effect accepted this. After coming under pressure from
development groups, it agreed to sell an AIDS drug in South
Africa at a price that reflected the cost of production rather
than that cost plus the value of its patent.
The
Africa-Caribbean bill has been voted through the House but has
yet to pass the Senate. The AIDS-drug amendment's sponsors,
Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Russell Feingold, have hinted at a filibuster.
It would be wrong to hold the bill hostage. But the Senate should
approve their proposal, as an amendment to some other measure if not this time.
LOAD-DATE: May 06, 2000
