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U.S.-Central America Deal Could Block
Cheap AIDS Drugs
Emad Mekay
WASHINGTON, (IPS) - Volunteer social
worker Alain Rias, who helps treat
people living with HIV/AIDS in Honduras,
says his work has helped patients
recover, go back to work and support
their families.
But the French activist, who works with
Medicins sans Frontiers (MSF), known in
English as Doctors Without Borders, says
this work is threatened by a
controversial trade deal the United
States is trying to finalise with five
Central American countries.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert
Zoellick and ministers from Costa Rica,
El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and
Nicaragua are meeting Monday in
Washington for talks to launch a
U.S.-Central American Free Trade
Agreement (CAFTA).
CAFTA would eliminate tariffs and other
barriers to trade in goods, agriculture,
services, investment and the imposition
of intellectual property rights on
medicine, among other things. The
meetings are scheduled to wrap up by
Dec. 17.
But health activists are warning that
the deal could establish new rules for
the protection and enforcement of drug
company patents and other forms of
intellectual property rights that will
reduce access to medicine in one of the
Latin American regions hardest hit by
the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Rias has been giving antiretroviral
therapy in Honduras free of charge to
some 300 HIV/AIDS patients, mostly
women, over the past 18 months.
”Really, having access to medicine
changed their lives because many of them
are women and their main preoccupation
is staying alive to feed their children
and to see them grow,” Rias said during
a teleconference Monday organised by
health activists and experts lobbying
against limitations on access to
medicine under CAFTA.
”People recovered very quickly. They are
able to work again and earn a bit of
money to support their families. Many of
the women are without male partners
because they had to go abroad for work.
So the conditions are very hard
economically,” he said.
According to Doctors Without Borders,
the Honduran government purchased brand
name medicines for the disease at 850
dollars per person per year, while the
group buys generic drugs for half that
price. The difference goes mostly to
gigantic U.S.-based pharmaceutical
companies.
Activists say that the poor country is
under pressure from the United States to
continue to buy brand names rather than
the more affordable generic drugs.
”In the conversation we had we realised
that the government is under pressure to
continue to buy brand names and fears
retaliation from the U.S. government,”
Rias said.
Activists also worry that the trade deal
now being negotiated in Washington could
place dramatic limitations on compulsory
licensing, a procedure that allows a
government to authorise itself or a
third party to use a patented product,
with payment of reasonable compensation
to the patent holder.
Other provisions of the deal would
require companies that manufacture
generic drugs to redo costly tests to
obtain marketing approval. This would be
beyond the capacity of almost all of the
relatively small generic companies.
The provisions could ask the generic
drug company to delay using the results
of tests already completed by brand-name
companies for a period of five years,
creating patent-like barriers to market
entry of generics, even where no patent
exists.
”The new intellectual property rules
that the Bush administration is
aggressively negotiating for in CAFTA
will, we feel, obstruct access to
medicine by increasing medicine prices
and delaying or blocking generic
competition,” said Asia Russell of
Health GAP, a U.S.-based group that
lobbies for global access to HIV/AIDS
drugs, during the teleconference.
Civil society groups also view the
United States, particularly under the
right-wing Republican administration of
Pres. George W. Bush, as trying to
influence international trade rules to
favour corporations while undercutting
the ability of national and state
lawmakers in developing countries to
protect environmental and public health.
The Bush administration saw its
aggressive trade policy partly derailed
last month when ministers from 34
countries in the Western hemisphere
meeting in Miami failed to reach a
comprehensive agreement, as initially
envisioned, to open their borders for
trade.
The controversial Free Trade Area of the
Americas (FTAA) was originally designed
to open borders for free trade in the
entire region, with the exclusion of
Cuba.
Feeling threatened by the advance of
some more moderate politicians and the
evident increasing suspicion developing
countries now view these trade deals
with, the administration is now rushing
to finalise bilateral and regional
agreements.
In Miami, the United States announced
talks for a flurry of bilateral trade
deals with countries like Colombia,
Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.
The deals would make the United States
less responsive to pressure from
emboldened groupings of developing
countries, as happened during World
Trade Organisation (WTO) meetings in
Cancun, Mexico in September.
”Unfortunately however, the U.S. is
trying to move out from the WTO forum to
other forums where it thinks it may be
able to more successfully limit (other)
countries' ability to access generics
and to impose enhanced patent
protections,” said Robert Weissman,
co-editor of Essential Action, a
corporate accountability watchdog group.
”They tried to do that with FTAA with
unclear success,and they are moving
increasingly to bilateral and many
regional agreements, of which CAFTA is
the most important right now, he said.
Once the CAFTA agreement is finalised,
Panama and the Dominican Republic are
expected to agree to similar or
identical terms without extensive
negotiations of the details, a step that
could deprive more HIV/AIDS patients
from affordable medicines.
But for Rias, people in Honduras --
where MSF says that one person dies of
AIDS every two hours -- no trade
agreement that could keep life-saving
medicine off-limits is needed. A
programme that puts more medicine into
their hands is.
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