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South Africa Vetoes AIDS Emergency

' By Jon Jeter - >Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, March 15, 2001
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, March 14 -- President Thabo Mbeki today rejected appeals to declare South Africa's AIDS epidemic a national emergency, a step that would enable the government to override patents owned by foreign pharmaceutical firms and buy or manufacture cheap, generic versions of life-prolonging AIDS medicines.
Addressing Parliament, Mbeki said he did not think it necessary to invoke a World Trade Organization provision that allows member nations to >suspend patents in cases of extreme national urgency, without the patent-holders' consent.
The government passed a law four years ago that permitted its health minister to bypass drug-makers' patents to provide cheaper generic versions of the treatments. But that law, which is narrower in scope than the WTO provision, is being challenged in court by a coalition of nearly 40 pharmaceutical firms. Labor unions, human rights activists and opposition politicians have urged Mbeki's governing party, the African National Congress, to declare a state of emergency that would make cheaper drugs available under the WTO provision, rather than place all its hopes on the 1997 law and face a protracted legal ordeal.
If the trade pact's national emergency clause were activated, all property rights in South Africa would be temporarily suspended, and many in the country's business community have raised concern over the kind of signal that would send abroad. Foreign investment here declined by 50 percent last year, and surveys show that foreign business executives often fail to distinguish South Africa from neighboring Zimbabwe, where the government all but encourages black peasants to illegally occupy land owned by white farmers.
Mbeki explained his refusal to declare an emergency by saying that South Africa's own law was adequate in providing wider access to AIDS medicines.
Mbeki said that under WTO guidelines, a state of emergency could only be declared to restore peace and order and that no such threats to the country's security existed.
In neighboring Botswana, where 36 percent of adults are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, the government announced today it hoped to provide antiretroviral medication by year's end to all who need it. Botswana has the highest rate of HIV infection in the world, but the country's entire population of 1.6 million is less than the number of HIV victims here.
Botswana's President Festus Mogae said that failure to arrest the spread of AIDS in his country "means blank extinction -- it's a reality," news services reported.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company