[Ip-health] Interpress Service: U.S.-Central America Deal Could Block Cheap AIDS Drugs

[Mike Palmedo]

http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=3D21449

U.S.-Central America Deal Could Block Cheap AIDS Drugs

Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Dec 8 (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.

=94Really, 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,=94 Rias said during a teleconference
Monday organised by health activists and experts lobbying against
limitations on access to medicine under CAFTA.

=94People 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,=94 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.

=94In 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,=94 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.

=94The 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,=94 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.

=94Unfortunately 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,=94 said Robert Weissman, co-editor of
Essential Action, a corporate accountability watchdog group.

=94They 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. (END/2003)
**