According to an article by Kelly Hearns, the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) will provide increased profits for pharmaceutical companies at the expense of poor AIDS patients in Latin America. World Trade Organization’s TRIPS agreement (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property), gives poor countries the right to break drug patents in health emergencies. The U.S. signed on to that deal, as well as a subsequent agreement called the Doha Declaration, which further clarified the public health aspects of intellectual property and reaffirmed poor countries’ rights to essential medicines. But through the “data exclusivity” provision of CAFTA, those rights would be curtailed by erecting barriers around pharmaceutical test data essential for introducing generic drugs in poor markets. According to the “data exclusivity” clause, brand name companies are given a window of five years before generic copies of their drugs can be made, a delay that could potentially cost many lives in countries where name brand name drugs are unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
Of course, CAFTA would not be the first time that the “Free Trade” agenda has come into conflict with the health and wellbeing of AIDS patients. According to an article by Abid Aslam, the policies of the World Bank and IMF are having a negative impact on public health spending in the poorest countries in the world. The article points out that in order to receive debt relief, each of sub-Saharan Africa’s 32 most heavily indebted poor countries (also known as HIPCs) must win bank and fund approval for a poverty reduction strategy that includes a budget projection. In some countries, these projections have functioned as health-spending ceilings, severely curtailing the amounts of aid these countries receive in order to fight the AIDS epidemic.
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