CAFTA Trade Deal Threatens Affordable AIDS Drugs In Central America

by Emad Mekay

But the French activist, who works with Medicins sans Frontiers (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, says this work is threatened by a controversial trade deal the United States is trying to finalize with five Central American countries.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and ministers from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua are meeting 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 would 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 per person per year, while the group buys generic drugs for half that price. The difference goes mostly to giant 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 realized 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 authorize 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 President George W. Bush, as trying to influence international trade rules to favour corporations that contribute handsomely to his campaigns while undercutting the ability of 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 socialist 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 the abortive World Trade Organization (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 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 finalized, 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, he said.