LONDON: Dick Cheney, the US vice-president on Friday night blocked a global deal to provide cheap drugs to poor countries, following intense lobbying of the White House by America’s pharmaceutical giants.

Faced with furious opposition from all the other 140 members of the World Trade Organisation, the US is refusing to relax global patent laws which keep the price of drugs beyond reach of most developing countries.

The White House was holding out as the minutes ticked towards the midnight deadline set by the WTO (World Trade Organization) for a deal to be struck that would permit a full range of life-saving drugs to be imported into Africa, Asia and Latin America at cut-price costs.

Sources in Geneva said last night that the negotiating strategy was coming straight from the White House with Mr Cheney seizing the reins from America’s trade negotiator, Robert Zoellick. Mr Zoellick helped broker a deal on affordable drugs at the WTO’s meeting last year in Doha under which developing countries were promised they would be able to override patent laws in the interest of public health.

However, America’s drug industry has fought tooth and nail to impose the narrowest possible interpretation of the Doha declaration, and wants to restrict the deal to drugs to combat HIV/Aids, malaria, tuberculosis and a shortlist of other diseases unique to Africa.

Trade officials in Geneva last night that they were not optimistic about a deal being reached and that failure could push the Doha agreement, which covers everything from cutting farm subsidies to introducing more competition into services, to the brink of collapse.

Out of 144 WTO members, the current draft “already has the support of 143”, said Brazilian diplomat Antonio de Aguiar.

America’s drug industry expressed confidence that its lobbying of the Bush administration would pay off. “I don’t have any indication that the US is changing its position on that at all,” Shannon Herzfeld of PhRMA, the organisation representing leading US pharmaceutical companies, told Inside US Trade, the specialist trade magazine.

The industry argues that it spends billions a year on drug research and that if copycat companies can override their patents and manufacture drugs at bargain prices, research will dry up. However, aid agencies lobbying on behalf of poor countries pointed out that the cut-price drugs will only be sold in countries which could not afford to buy them at first world prices. They accused the White House of being in the pocket of big US drug corporations.

“The joke in Geneva this morning is that they couldn’t make a decision because the CEOs of Merck and Pfizer were still in bed,” said Jamie Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, a US lobby group.

Aside from HIV/Aids, drug companies do almost no research into the diseases on the US shortlist. The list excludes diseases like cancer, asthma and pneumonia which are killers in the developing as well as the developed world.

“The drug industry is saying that any disease that is profitable [to big pharmaceutical companies] won’t be included,” said Mr Love.

A deal on cheap drugs is seen as essential to keep developing countries engaged in the trade round, which was started at the behest of the US and the European Union just over a year ago.

Poor countries were signalling la last night that they would be prepared to walk away from the table, rather than accept the limited deal on offer from the US.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.