One of the questions to be explored (at the workshop) is whether differential pricing is good for everyone - beneficial to the consumer in the poor countries but not be harmful to maintain incentives for innovation.
Some NGOs fear that the pharmaceutical corporations would agree, but on an autonomous basis without any governmental or intergovernmental interventions or supervision, to segment markets and charge differently in different markets, but in return secure what they could not in the Uruguay Round and TRIPS, namely ability to prevent parallel imports in any market.
The pharmaceutical industry was one of the prime forces (the US film and computer software industries were the others) behind the United States drive for the Uruguay Round multilateral trade negotiations and its trade agenda, that resulted in the drawing up of minimum global norms and standards of patent rights under intellectual property protection, and securing of monopoly rights for the patent owners.
A very clever media campaign that dubbed as pirates and counterfeiters all those challenging and differing with the efforts to write global standards, silenced many of the civil society organizations outside, and more so because the actual demands, issues and the course of negotiations were highly secretive and became public only as a fait accompli, with the full implications sinking in only now - as developing countries are finding themselves obliged to implement and disputes have begun to crop up at the WTO (and in the case of South Africa in its domestic courts).
As the poor developing countries battled the rich and powerful, nations of the world in virtually secret talks among a few (developed and developing countries) for nearly 8 long years in the Uruguay Round (UR) negotiations under GATT-auspices, where the influence of the majors and their corporation reigned supreme, and the IMF and the World Bank pressuring the developing world under the banner of free trade, the rest of the international system seemed to stand aside, unable or unwilling to confront the United States and the prevailing economic orthodoxy of neo-mercantalist liberalism..
At the WHO itself, after the departure of Hafdan Mahler as Director-General in the mid-1980s, the viewpoints of the big pharmaceutical corporations got a footing. And only after 1995, the WHO, under Nakajima, began looking at the problem of essential drugs and prices and TRIPS. And when Nakajima was replaced by Mrs. Gro Harlem Brundtland, she started with the view that health and intellectual property interests were reconcilable and the two organizations could work together. Within WHO, she promoted a round-table with the pharmaceutical industry for drugs to combat Third World health issues.
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