Mr President, given the millions of deaths in developing countries, the European Commission’s proposal for an action programme against communicable diseases in developing countries is a strong initiative that contributes to affirming the right to health on the international stage. If the European Union wishes to play a distinguished role in this fight and to make its action have a real impact, public health must become a priority for its cooperation in developing countries, and therefore be actually reflected in its budget. This is why we are opposed on this point to the rapporteur’s oral amendments. This is a shame, because we have done a great deal of preparatory work with Mr Khanbhai, in order to strengthen his initial resolution, and the votes of the Committee on Development and Cooperation enabled us to achieve a broad consensus. At the same time, the media coverage of the actions brought by the pharmaceutical industry and the United States against South Africa and Brazil, which produce or import generic anti-AIDS drugs, lifted the veil on the economic stakes and pushed the European Union to specifically commit itself to the side of those poor populations needing access to treatment. Although it makes sense to tackle the fight against tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS in a single programme, we do, however, need to distinguish between the specific problems posed by these three diseases. In the case of tuberculosis, although there is a vaccine for the prevention of this disease, its effectiveness is highly disputed and there is an ever-increasing amount of resistance to treatment. There is no vaccine for malaria and although drugs to treat the disease are inexpensive, they are decreasingly effective due to increased incidences of resistance. There is no vaccine for AIDS nor any treatment that is accessible to the people from the South, as the pharmaceutical laboratories that own the patents keep the prices at an exorbitant level. Moreover, we regret that diseases such as filariasis, trypanosomiasis, sleeping sickness, the Ebola virus or various forms of diarrhoea are not the subject of the Commission’s communication as they are causing an ever-increasing number of deaths. Effective and coherent action against these diseases should therefore offer different solutions depending on the case, but also combine measures on several levels. First of all, prevention involves education and information campaigns, particularly aimed at at-risk groups, such as women and young people, conducted on the ground by influential local figures. For the prevention of AIDS, therefore, promoting the use of condoms is a public health duty. The best form of prevention remains the guarantee of good housing and working conditions, nutrition and health. Development policy as a whole and all Community policies should therefore contribute to the key objective of improving public health. In the same way, we need a more general discussion about the environment. For example, by increasing the amount of stagnant water surfaces, damming policy has caused the number of parasite diseases to rocket. Secondly, it is essential that we improve or even create health structures and train the staff required for the detection, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of these diseases. The European Community development aid programme, specifically within the framework of the EDF, should be focused on health services, which have been neglected for too long due to budgetary restrictions imposed by structural adjustment. The local health NGOs should be able to receive funds in order to carry out their day-to-day work of prevention and of supporting patients. They should be involved in drawing up aid programmes in this field and be incorporated into public health action. Thirdly, everyone should have access to treatment. This means that medication should be sold at cost price to people in developing countries. Another solution would be for these countries to have licences that authorise them to produce generic drugs. In fact, the only way to free the people of the South from the grip of the multinational firms on price fixing for drugs in the long term is to establish a regional or local pharmaceutical industry. The TRIP agreements should be interpreted in the same fashion, and should reaffirm the right of developing countries to use compulsory licences in the event of a health emergency. Pharmaceutical firms need to be made to respect human rights. In fact, following the media pressure over recent months, some of them are taking a greater interest and have promised to reduce their prices. These measures are isolated, however, limited to a few products for a few countries and will take time. Moreover, they are still rejecting the principle of compulsory licences. This rejection of compulsory licences forces us to question the duration of the protection of patents. We could also ask ourselves whether a reduction in the duration of patents is not, after all, an excellent stimulant for research. Fourthly, we need to give new impetus to research, and this is a fundamental point. We need to find new preventive and curative treatments that are more effective, and more importantly better adapted to local populations. For this purpose, an international research centre on Southern diseases, financed by public and private funds, would enable us to completely free research from the purely mercenary interests of certain manufacturers. Finally, and this is what I believe to be the most important point in this debate, is the fact that we know that the very people in the South who are dying from these diseases are urgently waiting for our help, and have been for a long time. I think that we should broadly develop all of these structures. All these concerns have been largely incorporated into Mr Khanbhai’s report. This is why we call on you to vote in favour of the report, and we hope that all of these speeches will for once not go unheeded, because the people of the South need us.

Political group: Verts-ALE