Minutes - TRIPS Council - View details of the intervention/statement

Ambassador Mero (United Republic of Tanzania)
14 OTHER BUSINESS
413. There is a critical mass of information in this room which could make this TRIPS Council very vibrant. Sometimes we limit ourselves because we are entrenched in the position of the 1960s and this is 2016. The world has changed so much and I am just open-minded. New thinking is needed that addresses carbon footprint, climate change, poverty, poor production and consumption that leads to more pollution of the world and so on. This TRIPS Council is supposed to address intellectual property that is related to technology that will always lead us to a green economy. 414. If that is the case, we have to give space to new ideas in this room in informal mode. I think the informal mode here taught me one thing, i.e. that people have a lot of understanding of the issues and we can use it for the better. We can always make this Council to inform the world where to go because intellectual property will lead to new green technologies that address climate change and sustain the sanctity of resource assessment, etc. 415. We should not be a hostage of rules. If the rules of 1960 are not good for today, let us talk like intellectuals here and say this rule, in informal mode, is outdated and let us do something about it. If you find it is not, then you can create platforms to look at it again and see how best to make it better for us. 416. So let us return to our offices, thinking that this is a new Council trying to revive itself, to address the most difficult subject of IP. IP is totally scientific, it is technological and it is informational. This is where we make decisions that make sense for the world of tomorrow.
IP/C/M/82, IP/C/M/82/Add.1