Health GAP
www.healthgap.org

May 28, 2004
Contact: Asia Russell 1 267 475 2645

Central America Trade Deal Trades Away Access to Low Cost AIDS Medicines

(Washington, D.C.) In reaction to today's signing of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the AIDS activist group Health GAP criticized the agreement for threatening access to affordable, life-saving generic drugs in the region. CAFTA is a trade agreement between the U.S. and five Central American countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala.

CAFTA contains new obligations that the five countries protect the intellectual property of drug companies, above and beyond what is already required by World Trade Organization rules. These obligations will delay and obstruct generic competition, according to activists, driving the cost of medicines up, compromising public health, and threatening the lives of millions.

"The protectionism demanded by U.S. drug manufacturers, and willingly ceded by the White House, will cost lives in Central America," said Asia Russell of Health GAP. "Bush is using trade deals to please his drug company cronies, no matter the impact on people dying without access to treatment."

Generic competition, which has reduced AIDS drug costs as much as 98%, from $15,000 per year to $140 per year, is a major force in facilitating AIDS treatment scale up in Central America. Activists are concerned that CAFTA would reverse that trend in a region where 20,000 people are already HIV positive.

CAFTA includes provisions that will require countries to prolong drug company patents beyond 20 years, grant monopoly rights to drug companies over "test data," acting as an additional, patent-like barrier to generic competition, and will link the national registration status of a drug to its patent status. This linkage of patent and registration status could open the door to bogus patent claims by drug companies, according to activists.

In 2001, WTO members pledged that countries could override drug company patents in order to protect public health and promote access to medicines for all. Since that time, the Bush Administration has used bilateral and regional trade agreements, outside the multilateral jurisdiction of the WTO, to extract higher levels of intellectual property protection for pharmaceuticals.

"Congress must reject the CAFTA and any other U.S. agreement that puts the commercial interests of profiteering drug companies over the human right to access to affordable medicines," said Jen Cohn of Health GAP.

The Bush Administration is also preventing the rapid procurement of quality assured generic medicines in its $15 billion bilateral AIDS program, by requiring generic manufacturers to submit to a burdensome, time consuming process through the FDA. The World Health Organization already assesses the safety of generic medicines through its pre qualification project. The American process, activists say, will accomplish the same obstruction of generic competition that will likely result from the White House's CAFTA trade deal.

In addition to the CAFTA, USTR has completed or is negotiating trade agreements with Panama; the Dominican Republic; the Andean nations Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia; the countries of the Southern African Customs Union Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland; Morocco; Australia and Thailand, among others.

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