The WTO faces a make or break week over vaccines
A crisis at the World Trade Organization has been brewing for years and it now looks like coming to a head. There are many potential flash points as trade ministers assemble for talks in Geneva this week but in the end they boil down to a single issue: vaccines.
Put simply, the WTO’s members need to decide whether they are going to waive patent protection for Covid-19 treatments developed in the west so that poorer countries can manufacture their own lower-cost vaccines. What the meeting ought to do is come up with a meaningful agreement covering the waiving of patent rules not just for the current but any future pandemic. If it does so, the WTO will live to fight another day. All the other vexatious issues – and there are plenty of them – will be fudged or kicked down the road.
If, on the other hand, the status quo (or something close to it) prevails, it is hard to see much future for the WTO as a multilateral organisation. The message from the governments of wealthy developed nations to developing countries will come across loud and clear: we look after our own.
Richer countries make all the right noises about the need to share the benefits of the breakthroughs made to fight Covid-19, but in practice they have been dragging their heels in talks for the past two years. Switzerland, the EU, the UK and the US – all of which have strong and powerful pharmaceutical sectors – have tried to make any waiver to TRIPS (trade related intellectual property rights) as weak and as time-limited as possible.
In a sense, this is inevitable. Trade negotiations are not really about which bits of a country’s economy are opened up to competition; they are about the sectors and interest groups that a country seeks to protect. The argument made
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