Why Was a WIPO Development Agenda Necessary?
The Development Agenda should be understood, first and foremost, as a reform platform. The discussion for the establishment of the agenda was initially introduced by Argentina and Brazil in 2004 to address a range of problems which can be grouped into four sets of issues. The first of these revolves around the evident loss of balance between the public domain and the knowledge appropriated through intellectual property (IP) rights. In simple terms, a growing number of stakeholders, including civil society organisations, academics and governments – backed by new evidence such as that contained in the UK Commission on Intellectual Property Rights Report of 2002 and the ideas generated through processes such as the ICTSD- and UNCTAD-organised Bellagio series on development and IP policy – had reached the conclusion that WIPO was at the forefront of promoting IP rights as an end in themselves as opposed to seeing such rights as a means to serve the socio-economic needs of society. The seco
