98. The representative of Chile welcomed the discussion on the TRIPS/CBD issue in the Council. He supported the considerable progress made in the WIPO IGC and hoped that the CBD could achieve positive results in the course of this year. Referring to the Bolivian proposal, he said that the three essential requirements for patentability set forth in Article 27.1 of the TRIPS Agreement, i.e. novelty, inventiveness and industrial application, should be applied and respected in full, and that if this was the case, there should be no contradiction or conflict with misappropriation of naturally occurring life forms. It was essential that national and regional patent offices should have access to all the information available to avoid granting erroneous patents that did not comply with the patentability requirements. Recognizing the possible benefit of the disclosure requirement, he said that the disclosure proposal was worth exploring. Nevertheless, the artificial linkage between three TRIPS issues would complicate the discussion and make it difficult to achieve substantive progress.
