AMENDMENT OF TRIPS AGREEMENT WELCOMED BY CARIBBEAN CHRIST CHURCH, BARBADOS – “The Caribbean welcomes the recent consensus agreement by WTO Members to amend the TRIPS Agreement and allow Members with insufficient or no pharmaceutical product manufacturing capacity the facility allowed other Members to address their public health needs through compulsory licensing of patented inventions.” This was the reaction of Director General of the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (RNM) Ambassador Dr. Richard Bernal to agreement clinched in Geneva yesterday, that approved changes to the intellectual property agreement making permanent a decision on patents and public health originally adopted in 2003. The amendment completes a process that began with the declaration on TRIPS and health by ministers at the November 2001 WTO Doha Ministerial Conference. The amendment thus enables developing countries to access affordable medicines to combat serious public health problems such as AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other epidemics. For the Caribbean, a critical aspect of this hard won consensus is the recognition that countries with undeniably limited capacity, in this case Least Developed Countries, should be allowed to act within existing collective arrangements to harness economies of scale for the purposes of enhancing purchasing power and facilitating local production. The Caribbean and many other WTO Members have been making the case for this type of consideration to be made for Small Vulnerable Economies, within all areas of the WTO Agreements. The effect of such concessions to these Economies on the patterns of world trade flows is obviously insignificant, yet, by comparison to the size of these Small Economies, the effect on the development prospects of the WTO Members concerned is enormous. The Caribbean fully anticipates that this welcome initial step can become the harbinger of development issues that at last appear to be permeating the WTO Agreements, as intended by Ministers in Doha. Coming less than a week before the start of the Sixth WTO Ministerial set for December 13 to 18 in Hong Kong, the amendment is a welcome boost for embattled global trade talks.