TPP and Doctors Without Borders - Trading Away Health

[Oscar]

Trading Away Health - Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres on TPP

[ http://aids2012.msf.org/wp-content/uplo ... ly2012.pdf ]

July 2012

EXCERPT:

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural disasters and exclusion from healthcare in nearly 70 countries. MSF began providing antiretroviral (ARV) treatment for HIV/AIDS in 2000, and now treats 222,000 people in HIV/AIDS projects in 23 countries.

More than 80% of the AIDS drugs that MSF uses worldwide are generics from India. MSF routinely also relies on generic drugs to treat TB, malaria, and a wide range of infectious diseases.

MSF is concerned about the public health implications of the U.S.’s IP demands on the countries currently negotiating the TPP. Furthermore, as the final text of the TPP is likely to become a precedent for future trade agreements and IP negotiations, MSF is concerned that these restrictive IP policies, known as "TRIPS-plus" provisions, will be imposed on additional developing countries, including where MSF works, affecting access to medicines for millions of patients.

Closed-Door Negotiations with Far-Reaching Impacts

MSF opposes the secrecy under which the TPP negotiations are being conducted, which forces MSF, civil society and other interested stakeholders to rely on "leaked texts" to evaluate the impact of an agreement that will affect more than half a billion people in at least 11 countries, and potentially many more. The closed-door nature of the TPP negotiations has also come under intense criticism from some members of the U.S. Congress (see Appendix B), as well as public health advocates and consumer groups,4 who have asked the U.S. Administration to increase transparency and allow public scrutiny by making negotiating positions and texts public. As it stands, only the final agreed-upon text will be made publicly available – after it is too late to evaluate the public health impact or modify egregious provisions.

The norms that emerge from these negotiations are expected to serve as a baseline for future trade agreements, potentially impacting a much wider group of countries. Yet unlike in negotiations under the auspices of the World Health Organization (WHO), World Trade Organization (WTO) or World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the TPP process does not allow public scrutiny of the specific provisions being negotiated. Meanwhile, more than 600 corporate representatives on government advisory boards do have full access to the U.S. negotiating positions.5

[ . . . ]