 24th Feb 07 - Emad Mekay, IPS World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz may appoint a new resident director for Iraq soon, a move that sources inside the Bank say could contradict the institution's policies on engagement in conflict-stricken areas and put his role in the 2003 U.S. invasion back into the limelight.
The move by Wolfowitz, the former number two official at the Pentagon and a main architect of the U.S.-led war, likely means the Bank would release new loans to the occupied Arab nation, despite the deteriorating security situation and recent disclosures of massive corruption in reconstruction efforts.
"This is exactly what he shouldn't be doing and what the [World Bank] board was initially afraid that he would do, which is to use the financial resources of the World Bank to take some of the heat off the U.S. Treasury and U.S. policy," Bea Edwards of the Washington-based watchdog group Government Accountability Project told IPS.
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 10th Feb 07 - Christine Ahn, TomePaine.com
Trade representatives from the United States and South Korea are racing against the clock to sign the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement under the “fast track” deadline. With $72 billion dollars traded annually between the two countries, the KorUS FTA would become the second largest trade deal after the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). While such a trade deal would normally sail through the halls of the U.S. Congress and the Korean National Assembly, times have changed since the first free-trade regimes rolled into Washington, D.C., and Seoul. Critics of unfettered trade have had over a decade of evidence revealing how NAFTA has devastated the lives of working people across the continent. In the 2006 midterm elections, 37 members of Congress were elected on a fair-trade platform, ousting pro-free trade incumbents. Newly elected Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia even took the opportunity on primetime national television to challenge the Washington consensus on trade. In response to President Bush’s State of the Union address, Webb said that America's workers should ''expect, rightly, that in this age of globalization, their government has a duty to insist that their concerns be dealt with fairly in the international marketplace.'' |
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 5th Feb 07 - Robert Kuttner, Boston Globe Get ready for a revolution in trade politics. This week, President Bush reiterated his call for authority to make more trade deals, which expires June 30. He went on the road for a photo-op at a Caterpillar Tractor plant, arguing that trade deals promote exports. But in the new Congress, extension of current "fast track" negotiating authority is a dead letter. The entering class of Democrats are nearly all fair-traders, demanding much more balanced rules for the trading system. Thirty-nine of the 42 freshma n Democrats in the House recently sent a letter to the Democratic leadership warning their leaders off the Bush trade agenda. In the Senate, five of the six Democrats who picked up Republican-held Senate seats have joined a new populist caucus, insisting on fairer trade rules. Tuesday and Wednesday, business oriented Democrats invited three Clinton veterans, Gene Sperling, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers, to House Ways and Means Committee hearings to defend the old trade agenda, which has produced chronic trade deficits and hollowed out American industry. |
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22nd Jan 07 - IRIN The liberalisation of the fishing industry will have a negative impact on food security in the developing world, according to a new report by the advocacy group, Greenpeace International. "Trading Away Our Oceans" states that liberalisation would cause fish prices to rise in developing countries as more resources would be diverted to fishing for export, leading to a drop in supplies for local consumption.
It would also increase pressure to divert food from the plates of the poor to fishmeal processing to supply unsustainable forms of salmon and shrimp aquaculture.
Tariffs on fish and fish products are to be significantly reduced and perhaps even eliminated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), a move that will benefit only a handful of developed fish-exporting countries that have well-established fisheries management, according to Greenpeace.
"The WTO impact will be to make fish cheaper but only in the short term," Daniel Mittler, a trade adviser with Greenpeace said at the launch of the report on Friday, in Nairobi, Kenya's capital.
Liberalisation would only accelerate resource depletion through continued over-fishing, especially in developing countries, leading to higher prices in the medium to long term as global supplies diminish, according to the report. In addition, liberalisation of fisheries threatens the marine environment. Already, the effects of over-fishing are being felt along the Kenyan coast, with a decline in fish stocks undermining the livelihoods of the coastal population, Athman Seif, the executive director of the Kenya Marine Forum, said.
"Boats are sailing further from the shore but returning with less," Seif said.
The cost of fish in Malindi, one of Kenya's coastal towns, has doubled from 120 shillings (US$1.50) per fish 10 months ago to 240 shillings ($3) now, he said.
"Fishing on the inner shores is also harmful for marine life because these shores are a critical fish-breeding ground due to the coral reefs," he said.
The fishermen often lack the necessary equipment to go farther out, with offshore fishing, beyond 10 nautical miles from the shore, dominated by foreigners. The fish is usually destined for sale in Europe and Japan.
"Fish that should have fed the people [in the developing world] ends up on dinner plates in Europe," Sari Tolvanen, a marine biologist and oceans campaigner for Greenpeace International, said.
According to Mittler, local fishermen cannot compete against sophisticated large trawler fishing.
There are at least 600 foreign fishing vessels, operating with or without licences, along the Kenyan coast at any one time, according to a 2004/2005 study by the Kenya Fisheries Department.
Kenya should have a coast-guard system, Seif said. "Licensing [of foreign fishing vessels] should not take precedence over surveillance. There should be a balance between utilisation and conservation," he said.
Internationally, marine life close to becoming commercially extinct includes the popular blue fin tuna (sushi), cod and merlin, according to Greenpeace.
Greenpeace is calling on governments to create proper management systems for fisheries to prevent over-fishing.
It is also urging the international community to adhere to international conservation instruments such as the United Nations Law of the Sea, increase the monitoring and surveillance capacity of developing nations, and encourage the rebuilding of fish stocks through the establishment of marine reserves to protect threatened species and coral reefs, which are important fish-breeding grounds.
There is also a need for the implementation of fair fisheries partnership agreements between the developing countries and the north, Tolvanen said.
The launch of the Greenpeace report coincided with the World Social Forum, scheduled to start on 20 January, "which will be an opportune moment to call on leaders of the developed world to stop pursuing free trade at all costs", Mittler said.
Trade ministers are also scheduled to meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) on 27 January to discuss global trade liberalisation. "The message from Nairobi to Davos is crystal clear: plans for unbridled liberalisation of the global fish trade must be abandoned at once in light of the serious negative social and environmental impacts of over-exploitation that would follow," Mittler said.
"If Davos sets the path to move global trade liberalisation forward, our oceans and the long-term food security of billions of people will pay the price," he said.
[Full Report at: http://oceans.greenpeace.org/] Link to original source
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Despite an intensified campaign against poverty, World Bank programs have failed to lift incomes in many poor countries during the past decade, leaving tens of millions of people with stagnating and even declining living standards, according to a report released by the the bank's autonomous assessment arm.
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 Long a bipartisan crusade in Washington, “free trade” is now set to face some overdue opposition. And there’s no better time to start the rumble than in the lame duck session of Congress. The impetus for the new fight around trade, of course, is the Democratic sweep of the midterm elections. Many aspects of globalization politics have changed since the Democrats were last in power and Bill Clinton was president: Negotiations at the World Trade Organization, which drew massive protests in Seattle in 1999, have collapsed. Financial crises in East Asia and Argentina have discredited some of the central tenets of neoliberal corporate globalization. And the vision of a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas has been blocked by a new, feisty generation of Latin American leaders that is increasingly willing to stand up to Washington’s bullying. |
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BRUSSELS, Nov 2 (IPS) - Médecins Sans Frontières and other groups campaigning for access to affordable medicines in developing countries are closely following a case filed by the Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Novartis against Indian patent law.
A decision in this case can create an important precedent, with consequences that go far beyond India. "If the Novartis challenge against the Indian patent law is successful, patients worldwide who depend on India for affordable medicines risk becoming victims," Ellen 't Hoen, policy director with the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines told IPS.
"Eighty-four percent of AIDS medicines we currently use for patients in more than 40 countries come from India," Ellen 't Hoen said. "Because of the lower prices we can treat 60,000 people. If we would use only patented medicines this would be a lot less. And this is only one example."
As of 2005, India is bound by World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules in the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). But India remains one of the largest producers of generic medicines. Until 2005 it only recognised patents for a production process, not for a product, and this was good for Indian producers of generic medicines that develop their own process to produce a known medicine.
"India simply does not obey TRIPS, and our company has the right to make profit from its investment in research there too," Novartis spokesman in Belgium Xavier Thiriar told IPS. "India will be one of the largest markets in the world in terms of population, and they export a lot too."
Thiriar acknowledges that access to basic medicines can be a problem, but says that Novartis cooperates with MSF and gives free medicines worth large amounts of money.
But discounts and free medicines from companies are not a structural solution for the pressing lack of available medicines, Sigrid Sterckx, professor of ethics, and expert on patents at the University of Ghent in Belgium told IPS.
And India does obey TRIPS, argues Ellen 't Hoen of MSF. "India refuses patent applications for medicines for trivial improvements of known molecules. That is allowed under TRIPS."
Such "trivial improvements" can for instance involve removing a limy taste, says Sterckx. "I find it morally evident that this should not be patentable. But in Europe and the U.S. this sort of change is sufficient to get a new patent. The medicine is then sold more expensively, and people are made to think it is a real improvement."
The challenge to India's patent law arose when an Indian patent bureau rejected a patent application for the Novartis cancer drug Gleevec on the argument that the company wanted to patent a 'trivial improvement'.
Thiriar denies that Novartis has ever patented trivial improvements, whether in India or elsewhere.
But more is at stake here than the question whether the Gleevec version Novartis wanted to patent in India is innovative or not. Novartis not only went to court to fight the Gleevec case, but challenged the entire Indian patent law. The company has sued the Indian government, Indian producers of generic medicines and an Indian group of cancer patients before the Chennai High Court in southern India.
The case came up first Sep. 26. A new hearing is expected later in November.
"This is a very dangerous precedent for India and other countries," Leena Menghaney of MSF India told IPS on phone. "Now it's about Gleevec, but later on it will be about all other medicines."
The patent law cannot be allowed to weaken, Menghaney insists. "We cannot follow the western system -- people here have no health insurance, and when they get ill they may have to sell their house, their jewellery."
MSF and 16 other organisations are asking Novartis to withdraw the case. One of the signatories to an open letter the groups have written to Novartis is former Swiss president Ruth Dreifuss, who also chairs the World Health Organisation Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health (CIPIH).
Sterckx compares the current court case with the case that major pharmaceutical companies filed in 1998 against the government of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. They demanded that South Africa abolish a law that made it possible to produce or import affordable versions of patented AIDS medicines. They finally withdrew the case in 2001.
"It was a total PR (public relations) disaster for the pharmaceutical industry," Sterckx said. "Have they learned nothing from the debacle of those days?" Ann De Ron Published on 2nd November 2006, by IPS |
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