ISDS Case Map
medicines
Concerns are being raised by the Green Party as to how a free trade agreement with the United States might affect domestic drug-funding agency Pharmac.
The Daiichi Sankyo-Ranbaxy Laboratories deal has come as a shot in the arm for India's Comprehensive Economic Co-operation Agreement (CECA) negotiations with Japan. Indian pharma companies have been unable to break into Japan, the world's second largest drug market, due to the country's stringent sanitary and phytosanitary standards, technical barriers to trade (TBT) and environmental norms.
That's one of the take-away messages contained in a 68-page report that reviews the Bush administration's approach to trade agreements and intellectual property protection, specifically as it pertains to pharmaceuticals.
The United States has begun incorporating a revised intellectual property and health policy into its bilateral trade deals. But although the overall softer approach towards its partners may improve access to medicines, the debate on the impact of the US free trade agreements on public health in developing countries is not over, according to close observers.
Australians have a natural dislike of faceless people making major government policy decisions. Such activity seems to run counter to core principles about how a democracy should operate. Yet, this is what appears to have happened with the Medicines Working Group, established under the free trade agreement between Australia and the United States.
In its economic partnership agreement (EPA) negotiations with the ACP, the European Union seems to have forgotten the development dimension and pursues an agenda that reflects primarily the interest of the EU alone. This pattern is painfully evident in the EU's pursuit of new and higher standards for intellectual property and other trade-related areas.
What would happen if a government's policy for public health comes under siege by lawsuits from foreign companies?
The US-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) continues the practice of corporate hijacking global trade negotiations to the benefit of transnational drug and tobacco companies, and at the expense of people's health. It threatens core protections for public health, long under fire from NAFTA's notorious Chapter 11.
A section of India's generic drug industry has claimed that its ability to export generic drugs to over a dozen countries with which the US is planning FTAs will increase, if a “conceptual agreement” reached last week by the US' House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Bush administration is ratified and implemented.
Full text of the bipartisan trade deal reached between the US' Democrat-led Congress and the Bush Administration
