1. The Chairman recalled that paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health (hereinafter the Declaration) recognized that WTO Members with insufficient or no manufacturing capacities in the pharmaceutical sector could face difficulties in making effective use of compulsory licensing under the TRIPS Agreement and that the Ministers had instructed the Council to find an expeditious solution to the problem and to report to the General Council before the end of 2002. He reminded delegates that his predecessor had already proposed at the TRIPS Council's meeting in March 2002 that the TRIPS Council should plan to be in a position to make recommendations to the General Council about how this matter should be dealt with by the end of 2002 and had invited Members to submit proposals for concrete solutions to the problems by the present meeting, without this being a rigid deadline. Furthermore, the Secretariat had been requested to prepare notes providing available background information on, first, the extent to which patents exist in regard to the diseases referred to in the Declaration and, second, manufacturing capacity for medicines in different countries. The Chairman recalled that the first of the notes requested from the Secretariat, namely a note on "Available information on the Existence of Patents in Regard to Diseases Referred to in the Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health" had been circulated in document IP/C/W/348. The second Secretariat note on "Available Information on Manufacturing Capacity for Medicines" had been circulated in document IP/C/W/345.
2. The Chairman reported that the Council had received the following communications containing proposals on paragraph 6 of the Declaration from Members: a communication from Kenya on behalf of the African group (IP/C/W/351); a communication from the European Communities and their Member States (IP/C/W/352); a communication from the United Arab Emirates on its understanding of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health (IP/C/W/354); a communication from Brazil on behalf of Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, China, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Peru, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Venezuela (IP/C/W/355); and a communication from the United States (IP/C/W/358).
