“HOW DR- CAFTA WILL IMPACT ACCESS TO ESSENTIAL MEDICINES”

I-INTRODUCTION:

T he Dominican Republic Central America Free Trade Agreement is a free trade agreement negotiated between the United States, the five Central American nations and Dominican Republic. This comprehensive trade agreement incorporates two parts. One part lays out the common rules for trade between the countries including chapters on investment, services, intellectual property, transparency government, labor and environment. The other part incorporates a market access section, which contains the concessions made by the parties in terms of gradual elimination of tariffs and trade restrictions. “DR-CAFTA is an extension of the same policies put in the …ver más…

According to Renard Aron, assistant vice-president for Latin America and Canada at Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) that is due in part to the tariff on imported pharmaceutical and enable the brand-name companies to increase their prices.

The most important issue is the intellectually property provisions of DR-CAFTA, because the United States wants to increase the life of patent controls from 20-25 years. No concession is being made to exempt medicines for epidemic illnesses like AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other worldwide disease. DR-CAFTA assigns a low priority to public health and it will have implications for economic policies. For example, people with epidemic illnesses will have to wait 5 years or more to wait for affordable medicines to become available.

CAFTA’s patent and other intellectually property rules will delay generic competition and raise the price of medicines. As a result Central Americans will be denied medicines needed to treat illnesses including life-threatening diseases. The countries will be obliged to extend pharmaceutical terms, prevent the marketing approval of generic medicine if a patented version of the product is registered and grant additional exclusive marketing rights by prohibiting drug regulatory agencies to use original pharmaceutical test date for the registration of generic medicines.

Under the rules of the WTO Agreement on trade-Related Aspects of Intellectually Property