 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Mr. Martin Kaur who heads the South Centre in Geneva and who is very well known to climate activists, WTO activists for the kind of work that he has done on the trade negotiations earlier now on climate negotiations. Martin, good to have you back with us. Very good to be here. Martin, where do you think the WTO negotiations are going? The minute we had the development round, it seems the development is off the agenda and the negotiations are collapsing. Well, it's very clear that we will not be able to conclude this Doha negotiations this year or next year because the developing countries now see things in a very different way. I think the developed countries led by the United States but also the European Union, they have given up the pretence that this is something to do with development this round and they have made it not only a market access round but market access for their goods and services whilst at the same time they are sheltering their own important goods and this is something that is very hard for the developing countries to take. Still they had agreed on some basic texts of December 2008 in which the imbalances are so greatly against the developing countries but even that was not acceptable to the United States now and they are making more and more demands especially of India and China and the demands really are to open up important industrial sectors including chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs to have zero tariff in these three sectors, industrial machinery, pharmaceutical drugs and chemicals and electronics plus further opening in agriculture and in many services sectors including financial services. So at this point I think correctly India has taken the lead among the two three developing countries who came under this pressure to say that this is just not fair and we just cannot take this you know especially since India is hardly going to benefit at all. The demands that India has been making particularly in services you know that there will be stability in relation to their honouring outsourcing for call centres and other services the Indian demand that Indian professionals will be able to enter the United States more easily and with a certain number this have not been given. Of course in India a lot of people would have seen that trade-off as something as a trade-off between helping a certain section of the people who'd benefit from services against those who are involved in agriculture and other activities but leaving that issue out even that's not being accepted. Even that's not being accepted. But looking at the other picture that the first round of WTO ten years of WTO clearly showed that the countries which had benefited were really the western economies. The developed countries are the ones who really had benefited and this was supposed to redress that so effectively WTO still remains completely one-sided against the interest of the developing countries. It is one-sided the developing countries tried to change it by putting forward a hundred proposals on reforming the WTO. India took the lead. Ambassador Narayanan is the father of that. I think he is now in Hyderabad and that was supposed to be the centrepiece of this new round but today this whole thing has been cast aside and only the market access issues. You know that the big countries want to get into China, India and other developing countries has now become the major demand and the major theme and we have been forced to take a very defensive position. For example, India is one of the leaders of the group of 33 developing countries that have said that we need to protect ourselves and our farmers from import surges, cheap imports coming in, overwhelming the likelihoods of the farmers and that if this is going to happen in future then you can raise your tariff above the bound rate in order to defend the farmers' livelihoods. This proposal has been accepted in principle but not in practice because in practice there are so many conditions put for this special facility that it is almost useless. Can only protect a very small section of the agricultural imports if the way the US or the western countries or the European Union is argued. Yeah, the conditions for using it are so onerous that you can hardly make use of it, not even for a narrow ban of products. This is one of the issues which concerns both you and people like me who have been agitating on this for years that effectively it's hit a whole range of life-saving drugs particularly for those who most need it, those who cannot really afford high-cost drugs. That also has not been addressed in any significant way. Well, the Indian system you might say is the pride of the developing countries. You know the Indian Drugs Act of the 1970s that paved the way for you to have a thriving generic industry which was hampered by the TRIPS agreement and only in 2005 you really had to implement it and we are now seeing the suffering of that implementation because many drug companies are so uncertain about whether they will be able to expand the number of drugs that they can produce because now they may need to have a compulsory license and so on. It is the right of India to have compulsory license but at the same time that may be challenged by powerful countries and the drug industry is not really knowing whether they will get the compulsory license may not want to factor in investments in the future for something that might not appear. So I think this is the predominant effect that has implications not only for India. It has implications for many countries in Africa, in Asia and so on in Latin America that depend on cheap and high quality generics from India. My own country is Malaysia and the Malaysian government was the first to introduce a compulsory license. This was in 2004 and that compulsory license was to import three HIV AIDS medicines from SIPLA an Indian company from here. So in future we are not so sure whether these companies will be producing the new drugs. What is even more worrying for those of us who are watching the situation in India is the purchase of many Indian pharmaceutical drug companies by the multinational companies because it sends an element of uncertainty. We don't know whether the new owners will continue using these factories to produce low cost high quality drugs for the developing countries. Really look at the larger picture that health costs whether it's the US, whether it's the European Union are a significant section of what's called the welfare costs and you look at the fact that the patented medicine, patented products technologies are a major section of that. Do you think there is a really a possibility of getting a North South movement across the board for actually weakening the patent regime in the world? I think so because even in the United States there are many consumer groups and there are many people in the establishment too in the United States. Even the Democrats you know who are controlling Senate they have taken the position that you know it is important to reduce the cost of healthcare and that patents not only drive up the cost of healthcare but also prevent other companies from doing research. You know and there is a movement already even in the developed countries that are saying that the patent rights of the private you know holders have gone too far and that the consumer rights and the public rights have to reassert themselves. There is in fact already a North South citizens movement on access to medicine that has been operating quite effectively. Interestingly enough in the trade negotiations you get from the North from US particularly the far more regressive positions coming in on the question of patents. Yes because you know I think in terms of the balance of power and so on the big companies still are able to have greater influence over the government than this underlying force that is emerging but one very interesting thing is that the Obama administration at least the Attorney General's office themselves have taken the position that you should not the United States should not grant patents for genes for human genes because this of course has been a very major setback when the Supreme Court made a decision that genes even naturally occurring genes can be patented. That's an important and important milestone in that sense if that really goes through and the courts don't come out with something else. Unfortunately during the appeal well the courts actually ruled that you cannot patent genes that are naturally occurring but this has been overturned so we don't know what will happen at the final court. Thank you Martin. We will come back to you on this issue as the things seems unfold but as it appears the WTO negotiations seem to be deadlocked and that doesn't seem that this round is really going anywhere. Thank you very much. We will come back to you further on this. Thank you Prabir and thank you news click.