Acceso A Medicamentos

“HOW DR- CAFTA WILL IMPACT ACCESS TO ESSENTIAL MEDICINES”

I-INTRODUCTION:

T
he Dominican Republic Central America Free Trade Agreement is a free trade agreement negotiated between the United States, the five Central American nations and Dominican Republic. This comprehensive trade agreement incorporates two parts. One part lays out the common rules for trade between the countriesincluding chapters on investment, services, intellectual property, transparency government, labor and environment. The other part incorporates a market access section, which contains the concessions made by the parties in terms of gradual elimination of tariffs and trade restrictions. “DR-CAFTA is an extension of the same policies put in the North American free trade Agreement (NAFTA). Theimplementation of DR-CAFTA is seen key by the Bush administration and multinational corporations in obtaining the Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA), which would cover all the countries in the Western Hemisphere, except Cuba.[1]¨

DR-CAFTA will lead devastating consequences in terms of access to medicines for millions of people in Nicaragua and other countries of Central America. This tradeagreement among others already signed or currently being negotiated, undermines the right and obligation of countries to protect public health and promote access to medicines for all, in accordance with the World Trade Organization (WTO), Ministerial Declaration on the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and public health (Doha Declaration) which the UnitedStates adopted along with all other WTO members in November 2001. In terms of public health, environmental pollution, agriculture; CAFTA is the worst of all words, but Nicaragua is in a deep economic crisis and has few options.

II- POLITICAL-ECONOMIC CONTEXT:

Nowadays US drug companies export about $50 million of medicines a year to Central America and Dominican Republic. With adoption ofDR-CAFTA the big pharmaceutical companies, will increase the prices of medicines making difficult to buy them.

According to Renard Aron, assistant vice-president for Latin America and Canada at Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) that is due in part to the tariff on imported pharmaceutical and enable the brand-name companies to increase their prices.




The mostimportant issue is the intellectually property provisions of DR-CAFTA, because the United States wants to increase the life of patent controls from 20-25 years. No concession is being made to exempt medicines for epidemic illnesses like AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other worldwide disease. DR-CAFTA assigns a low priority to public health and it will have implications for economic policies. Forexample, people with epidemic illnesses will have to wait 5 years or more to wait for affordable medicines to become available.

CAFTA’s patent and other intellectually property rules will delay generic competition and raise the price of medicines. As a result Central Americans will be denied medicines needed to treat illnesses including life-threatening diseases. The countries will be obliged toextend pharmaceutical terms, prevent the marketing approval of generic medicine if a patented version of the product is registered and grant additional exclusive marketing rights by prohibiting drug regulatory agencies to use original pharmaceutical test date for the registration of generic medicines.


Under the rules of the WTO Agreement on trade-Related Aspects of Intellectually PropertyRights countries are required to every CAFTA country is a member of the WTO and thus already bound by its rules. The controversy over CAFTA’s intellectual property rules relates to requirements that go beyond the CA countries’s WTO obligation.


CAFTA created monopolies will cost lives; the situation is maybe more dramatic for AIDS, because it is a mortal disease for which effective life-saving...