World Health Organisation (WHO) chief Margaret Chan called for quick global agreement on Monday to ensure people in poor countries can get the drugs they need at affordable prices.

She issued the appeal at the start of a week-long meeting of health officials from developed and developing nations on how to combine low-priced drug supplies with continued incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop new medicines.

"The challenge is to work on multiple fronts to meet the immediate need for equitable access to quality affordable medicines, while also at the same time working to stimulate innovation," Chan said.

Delegates to the meeting are discussing a WHO-proposed draft plan that has been condemned by pharmaceutical companies. Richer countries home to much of the global drug industry are also cool to the plan.

The industry argues it needs strong revenues from drug sales to finance research and development into new treatments, including for diseases prevalent in developing countries.

Critics of the WHO plan also argue that it would take the UN health body into regulating issues of patent protection and copyright that belong in the World Trade Organisation and the World Intellectual Property Organisation.

But developing countries and health activists argue the WHO, through the IGWG, has every right to involve itself in issues of intellectual property when they touch on primary health care.

"If something is affecting public health, then the WHO is the proper place for it to be dealt with," Kenya's IGWG representative A.E.O Ogwell told a news conference.

African countries attending the IGWG session "want this meeting to come up with answers to the problems that we are facing", he said. "We want to finish the whole negotiation this time. We are not interested in lengthy talks."

Medecins Sans Frontieres and the US-based Knowledge Ecology International told the news conference that the current research and development model for new drugs was inadequate.