106. The representative of China welcomed the discussion on the item of the relationship between the TRIPS Agreement and the CBD in the Council. He said that this issue was a critical implementation-related issue for developing countries, and therefore it should be an integral part of the Doha Development Round. He said that most of the Members shared the objectives of preventing biopiracy and erroneously granted patents, and the divergence was on how to realize these objectives. Some Members believed that the objectives could be achieved through national access and benefit-sharing systems and database systems while other Members thought that these systems were not efficient enough. Most Members, including China, firmly believed that the disclosure requirement in patent applications would substantially contribute to fully implementing the three main principles of the CBD. Accordingly, the effective approach was to introduce the principles of the CBD into the TRIPS Agreement, which would provide an international legal framework and ensure the mutual supportiveness between the TRIPS Agreement and the CBD. He recalled that the Director-General's report of 9 June 2008 had clearly indicated that there was important common ground among Members on the underlying objectives, notably the importance of the TRIPS Agreement and the CBD being implemented in a mutually supportive way, avoidance of erroneously granted patents and securing compliance with national access and benefit-sharing regimes. He said that there had been wide acceptance of the need for patent offices to have accessibility to the information in order to make proper decisions and to avoid undermining the role of the patent system in providing incentives for innovation. He said that over two thirds of the WTO membership had co-sponsored the draft modality text as indicated in document TN/C/W/52, which requested the inclusion of the three TRIPS issues as part of the horizontal process. This convergence proved that the three TRIPS issues were mature politically and technically so that they merited substantive text-based negotiations in the horizontal process together with other issues, such as agriculture and NAMA. He requested that text-based negotiations on these issues be undertaken in Special Sessions of the TRIPS Council as an integral part of the Single Undertaking of the Doha Developed Agenda with the view of amending the TRIPS Agreement to implement the above-mentioned objectives as soon as possible.
