IGTN maintains that the WTO must confine itself to trade issues; therefore, trade-related issues that lie within domestic policy, not international trade policy, such as intellectual property rights, must be removed from WTO disciplines. Countries must have the soverign right and responsibility to protect their communities' biological and agricultural  resources, and conserve biological diversity.

IGTN Critical Engagement with the TRIPS negotiations

• IGTN asserts that member states must have the freedom and flexibility to determine and adopt appropriate regimes of sui generis systems that provide maximum protection for their farmers, breeders, indigenous knowledge and the right of their local communities to use, save and exchange seed and biological resources. 
• IGTN affirms the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health, paragraph 4, which grants rights to governments to act at the national level to take full advantage of the flexibilities and policy measures allowed in TRIPS, to ensure access to affordable medicines for all and to protect public health.
• To protect state’s and people’s rights, companies and individuals must obtain prior informed consent from the state, with the participation of local communities, including women, before having access to national biological resources.
• IGTN supports the substantive review of TRIPS Article: 27.3b as recommended by the Africa Group in its submission to the WTO (August 1999).

Long-range TRIPS Advocacy

• Remove TRIPS from the WTO.
• Support the African position to prohibit patents on plants, animals, microorganisms, and biological processes.
• Uphold the compulsory licensing provision of the TRIPS Agreement (Article 31) which permits countries to authorize the production of patented medicines without permission for the domestic market.
• Reduce the scope of TRIPS because it is in conflict with the basic tenets of the Convention on Biological Diversity and it formalizes monopoly privilege that misappropriates genetic resources and traditional knowledge to exclusive private and individual exclusive ownership.
• Affirm that traditional knowledge be recognized as a category of intellectual property to prevent third parties from using, selling, exporting and importing traditional and indigenous knowledge without prior informed consent and benefit sharing agreements.
• Maintain countries’ right and responsibility to govern access and apply norms, practices and customary law to all natural resources, whether such law is written or not.

The following resources address the TRIPS debate:

The TRIPS and Public Health Debate: An Overview

Controversy Over the TRIPS and Public Health Agreement

Additional resources are available in the IGTN Resource Library.