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Access and benefit-sharing (ABS) has been a mainstay of international law for more than 30 years, but it is hard to find concrete examples of it resulting in fair and equitable outcomes.

WHO member states struggled to understand and define the process of conducting negotiations during the first segment of the seventh meeting on the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body this week. This is even as they made slow and laborious progress in trying to improve a proposal for the negotiating text of a draft Pandemic Agreement, with their own proposals. This meeting will resume to conclude in early December and informal consultations will be conducted in the interim period.

Countries also decided to create subgroups on certain provisions in a bid to make quicker progress in attempting to narrow down vast divergences in positions on key issues including on technology transfer, intellectual property matters, financing and access and benefits-sharing among others.

While officially no country has as yet sought additional time for concluding the negotiations by the current deadline of May 2024, scores of delegations we spoke to, privately admitted that an extension would be inevitable in due course.

The job of global health negotiators working on a new Pandemic Agreement, and to amend the International Health Regulations, was already stacked against all odds. This has become even more difficult with Israel’s retaliation on Palestine following attacks by Hamas. The incessant attacks by Israel on health facilities in Palestinian Territories, directly speaks to the mandate of the WHO. It was no surprise that the crisis, bled into the discussions on the seventh inter-governmental meeting on the Pandemic Agreement this week in Geneva. Undoubtedly the stench of war pervaded the sterilized confines of the WHO headquarters where member states met this week.

It is on this fractured, splintered notion of international cooperation that diplomats have to now sew together new and complex rules on surveillance, information exchange and access to medical countermeasures. Commitments on accountability and transparency are also being sought. Tough that.

Global health governance confronts two long-term problems. One of them is a growing fragmentation and misalignment of agendas and initiatives. The other is a problem of power, encompassing accountability, transparency, and meaningful voice. Inevitably the two problems are linked, and nowhere more so than when it comes to the financing of global health agendas. Each of these problems have intensified since the pandemic, as identified by numerous commissions and initiatives including the International Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response and the more recent Future of Global Health Initiatives process.

Sangeeta Shashikant

The findings of the report from the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) relating to COVID-19 diagnostics and therapeutics affirm the insufficiency of existing initiatives such as voluntary licenses, tier-pricing and access schemes of international organizations in facilitating prompt access to these medical products in developing countries.

Research and development (R&D) needed to manufacture and deliver key pandemic response products (PRPs) such as diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics requires access to novel pathogen samples and their genomic sequencing data (GSD). Yet, many low and middle-income countries (LMICs) understandably do not want to share pathogens and GSD unless they can ensure that the benefits of R&D will be equitably distributed.

Judging by the Chairpersons’ Summary circulated at the end of the Senior Officials Meeting (SOM) on 24 October, attempts appear to be underway to transform the World Trade Organization (WTO), a multilateral trade body, into a plurilateral organization at the upcoming WTO’s 13th ministerial conference (MC13).

While the chair of the World Trade Organization’s General Council (GC) and the WTO Director-General said on 24 October that the two-day Senior Officials Meeting (SOM) ended on an optimistic note with clear guidance going forward, the Chairpersons’ Summary issued by them has raised some serious questions.

See full report for further details on Dispute settlement, TRIPS, Agriculture, Development, Fisheries subsidies, WTO reform, JSIs

Geneva, 24 Oct (D. Ravi Kanth) -- The high-profile meeting of capitalbased senior officials on 23 October apparently failed to decide on any deliverable in agriculture for the World Trade Organization’s 13th ministerial conference (MC13), to be held in Abu Dhabi in February next year, as seemingly deep differences came into the open on food security, the permanent solution for public stockholding (PSH) programs for food security, the special safeguard mechanism for developing countries, and domestic support, said participants familiar with the discussions

The United States has announced that it is withdrawing its proposals on cross-border data flows, location of computing facilities, and source code from the Joint Statement Initiative (JSI) negotiations on electronic commerce.