Ten years ago, the tobacco industry was formally identified as the enemy. The World Health Assembly approved a resolution stating that cigarette makers have operated with “the express intention of subverting the role of governments” in implementing policies designed to reduce cancer deaths.
An illustration of just how dangerous that industry is came in February 2010, when Philip Morris International sued Uruguay over graphic new health warnings on cigarette packets. Philip Morris was able to take this action under the provisions of an investment treaty between Uruguay and Switzerland. Like many similar agreements, that one allows corporations to take an entire nation to court if they encounter obstacles perceived as damaging to their profitability.
This kind of litigation could become commonplace if Karel de Gucht, the EU’s trade commissioner, has his way.
He appears determined to seize on provisions in the Lisbon treaty that give the European Commission responsibility for negotiating investment deals with foreign countries. India is likely to be a test case. De Gucht is hoping that he will wrap up talks on a free trade agreement with New Delhi this coming February. According to a paper drawn up by EU officials, such an agreement “shall provide for the progressive abolition of restrictions on investment, with the aim to ensure the highest level of market access and provide protection for investors and investments of both parties.”
In other words, de Gucht wants clauses in the agreement that would allow corporations sue India or the EU in the way that Philip Morris is suing Uruguay. The recent history of investment treaties has shown that because they allow for company-state arbitration, health, environmental or labour standards can be challenged on the grounds that they restrict investment. Vattenfall, the Swedish firm, is invoking a 1994 energy treaty to sue Germany over its decision to abandon nuclear power.
Making a killing
Philip Morris, incidentally, views the EU-India trade talks as an opportunity to make a killing (literally).
I have seen a copy of a letter sent to the European Commission in March 2010 signed by Kristof Doms from Philip Morris’ Brussels office and Jack Bowles, who represents British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International. The two men lamented that India is a “virtually closed market” because it applies high taxes on imported cigarettes. “In order to open the Indian market for cigarettes manufactured in the EU,” the despicable duo urged the Commission to insist on a free trade agreement that would remove all import duties they now have to pay in India.
Irrespective of whether these peddlers of disease get their way, there are strong reasons to fear that a free trade agreement will harm India’s poor.
Karel de Gucht and his team should read two important new documents.
The first one is a report published by the UN’s working group on human rights in India earlier this month. It gives an overview of the human rights situation in India, stating that the planned free trade agreements threatens the rights to health, food and work for much of the population. While that comment is directed at India’s trade agreements in general, the report zooms in on the one under negotiation with the EU, predicting it “would cut tariffs to zero for key sectors that support many producers and workers, thus exposing them to highly competitive international markets.”
The second paper de Gucht should study is a “right to food impact assessment” on the likely consequences of a trade agreement between the EU and India. It was prepared by the Third World Network, an Indian veterinary organisation called Anthra and the German anti-poverty group Misereor, among others.
Legal obligation
This study emphasises that de Gucht is under a legal obligation to respect human rights. Despite its numerous flaws, the Lisbon treaty does at least require that trade policy upholds rights of both a social and economic nature and a civil and political one.
So when trade with India is being discussed, de Gucht is obliged to recall that India is not simply a land with 55 dollar billionaires, it also has an estimated 224 million people living in chronic hunger. One of the enormous paradoxes of India is that food producers are themselves frequently vulnerable to food deprivation. About 70% of Indians depend on agriculture as their primary source of livelihood.
The impact assessment indicates that India’s dairy and poultry farmers would struggle to cope if they had to compete with cheap imports of European meat and milk products. Such farmers typically have to borrow for feed and other essentials and pay back their loans at high interest rates, making them dependent on getting reasonable prices. Women involved in small-scale agriculture would have to cut down on vital sources of nutrition like rice if their incomes were to decline, the assessment stated.
De Gucht is hoping that India’s middle class will flock to supermarkets owned by Carrefour and Tesco as a result of a free trade agreement. Those supermarkets tend to favour better-off farmers when buying food, meaning that they will bring no benefit to India’s poor. And the arrival of giant stores will surely be bad news for the family-run shops and street hawkers that form the backbone of the Indian economy.
Christmas is supposed to be a season for caring. As de Gucht tucks into his Yuletide dinner, I hope he will feel some remorse about the suffering he is trying to inflict on India.
●First published by New Europe, 19 December 2011.
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Monday, December 19, 2011
Monday, April 18, 2011
Big Pharma sets the agenda
Both my parents are pharmacists, so I grew up surrounded by medicines and people who relied on them to stay alive. The idea, then, that access to vital treatment should ever be denied horrifies me. What horrifies me more is that there is a bunch of lobbyists in Brussels who get paid handsomely to argue that such access should be restricted to the better-off.
Using freedom of information rules, I have obtained a few hundred documents exchanged between the European Commission and pharmaceutical corporations. Not everything I asked for has been released but there is enough here to realise that the myopic profit-fixated recommendations of Big Pharma are routinely swallowed by civil servants and regurgitated as official EU policy.
Right now, I’m looking at a 2008 letter about talks aimed at reaching a free trade agreement (FTA) between the EU and South Korea. It is signed by Brian Ager from the European Federation for Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) and was sent to a number of high-flyers in the Commission, including David O’Sullivan, then its director-general for trade.
Ager was adamant that the EU must have strong provisions on intellectual property included in any deal with Seoul. In particular, he wanted a clause relating to “data exclusivity”. That is a fancy way of saying that makers of generic drugs should be banned from using information (on safety and clinical trials, for example) that the “originator” of a medicine hands over to the authorities when registering that product. Data exclusivity is a monopoly power, different from patents. And the measures advocated by Ager stretch beyond the main international system on patents: the trade-related aspects of industrial property rights agreement (TRIPS).
As the EU has been pushing for six years of data exclusivity to apply to new medicines introduced in Russia and China, Ager argued that the same timeframe should apply with Korea. “A weaker regime in the context of the EU-Korea FTA agreement (sic) would have a negative effect beyond the single country, setting a precedent that may adversely influence other negotiations,” he wrote.
It is significant that Ager wanted the EU to be even more aggressive towards the Koreans than the Americans had been. A draft US-Korea agreement – still not ratified by either side in 2011 – provides for a data exclusivity system of only five years, he noted.
This does not mean that Washington is naturally inclined to be more generous to generics. In 2001, Jordan signed a free trade agreement with the US. Under it, the data exclusivity arrangements for many medicines was extended from five to eight years. In 2007, Oxfam published a report concluding that by delaying the availability of unbranded versions of medicines, Jordan’s drug prices rose by 20%. This was in a country where 40% of the population did not have health insurance. As a result, Jordanians suffering from heart disease and diabetes faced bills two to six times higher than their neighbours in Egypt, which didn’t have such onerous requirements, paid for the same medicines.
Admittedly, Ager didn’t get everything he coveted. The agreement that the EU eventually signed with Korea – and which MEPs approved in February – provides for the five year system that Ager deemed inadequate. But EFPIA is continuing to demand that the full six years should apply in a separate deal under negotiation with India, the key supplier of generic drugs used to fight AIDS and other major killers in developing countries.
EFPIA’s member companies include Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Merck. Of course, it professes to be concerned about healing the poor. But the documents I’ve seen paint a nastier picture.
In 2007, EFPIA’s Brendan Barnes pressurised the EU to torpedo an access to medicines initiative by Brazil. Whereas the Brazilian government wished to have greater attention paid to intellectual property issues by the World Health Organisation (WHO), Barnes contended that that Geneva-based body was not “well-equipped” to deal with such matters. It is obvious from his efforts to persuade the EU to resist “this expansion of the WHO’s mandate” that he wanted intellectual property to continue being treated as a commercial matter, rather than a public health one.
Barnes’s efforts proved effective. Later in 2007, Portugal, then the holder of the EU’s presidency, submitted a paper to the WHO, telling it to pay less attention to intellectual property.
Time and again, the documents given to me indicate there is a cosy relationship between the Commission and Big Pharma. Numerous meetings are held between the two sides, without any input from public health advocates or campaigners against poverty. And I was particularly interested to learn that some emails journalists send to the Commission are passed on to the drugs industry.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the correspondence is the inconsistency in it. While Big Pharma does everything to thwart competition from cheaper generics, it still sucks up to the EU hierarchy by proclaiming its commitment to “competitiveness” at every opportunity. In one 2010 letter EFPIA’s Andrew Whitty wrote: “The challenge is to find a policy approach that delivers fast access to medicine, enhanced competitiveness, balanced budgets and reward for innovation.”
Call me old-fashioned but I believe health care is about trying to make sick people recover or – in terminal cases – relieving their pain. The logic of profit and loss, of competitiveness and balanced budgets should be viewed as irrelevant in this debate, especially when it relates to the world’s poorest.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 17-23 April 2011
Using freedom of information rules, I have obtained a few hundred documents exchanged between the European Commission and pharmaceutical corporations. Not everything I asked for has been released but there is enough here to realise that the myopic profit-fixated recommendations of Big Pharma are routinely swallowed by civil servants and regurgitated as official EU policy.
Right now, I’m looking at a 2008 letter about talks aimed at reaching a free trade agreement (FTA) between the EU and South Korea. It is signed by Brian Ager from the European Federation for Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) and was sent to a number of high-flyers in the Commission, including David O’Sullivan, then its director-general for trade.
Ager was adamant that the EU must have strong provisions on intellectual property included in any deal with Seoul. In particular, he wanted a clause relating to “data exclusivity”. That is a fancy way of saying that makers of generic drugs should be banned from using information (on safety and clinical trials, for example) that the “originator” of a medicine hands over to the authorities when registering that product. Data exclusivity is a monopoly power, different from patents. And the measures advocated by Ager stretch beyond the main international system on patents: the trade-related aspects of industrial property rights agreement (TRIPS).
As the EU has been pushing for six years of data exclusivity to apply to new medicines introduced in Russia and China, Ager argued that the same timeframe should apply with Korea. “A weaker regime in the context of the EU-Korea FTA agreement (sic) would have a negative effect beyond the single country, setting a precedent that may adversely influence other negotiations,” he wrote.
It is significant that Ager wanted the EU to be even more aggressive towards the Koreans than the Americans had been. A draft US-Korea agreement – still not ratified by either side in 2011 – provides for a data exclusivity system of only five years, he noted.
This does not mean that Washington is naturally inclined to be more generous to generics. In 2001, Jordan signed a free trade agreement with the US. Under it, the data exclusivity arrangements for many medicines was extended from five to eight years. In 2007, Oxfam published a report concluding that by delaying the availability of unbranded versions of medicines, Jordan’s drug prices rose by 20%. This was in a country where 40% of the population did not have health insurance. As a result, Jordanians suffering from heart disease and diabetes faced bills two to six times higher than their neighbours in Egypt, which didn’t have such onerous requirements, paid for the same medicines.
Admittedly, Ager didn’t get everything he coveted. The agreement that the EU eventually signed with Korea – and which MEPs approved in February – provides for the five year system that Ager deemed inadequate. But EFPIA is continuing to demand that the full six years should apply in a separate deal under negotiation with India, the key supplier of generic drugs used to fight AIDS and other major killers in developing countries.
EFPIA’s member companies include Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Merck. Of course, it professes to be concerned about healing the poor. But the documents I’ve seen paint a nastier picture.
In 2007, EFPIA’s Brendan Barnes pressurised the EU to torpedo an access to medicines initiative by Brazil. Whereas the Brazilian government wished to have greater attention paid to intellectual property issues by the World Health Organisation (WHO), Barnes contended that that Geneva-based body was not “well-equipped” to deal with such matters. It is obvious from his efforts to persuade the EU to resist “this expansion of the WHO’s mandate” that he wanted intellectual property to continue being treated as a commercial matter, rather than a public health one.
Barnes’s efforts proved effective. Later in 2007, Portugal, then the holder of the EU’s presidency, submitted a paper to the WHO, telling it to pay less attention to intellectual property.
Time and again, the documents given to me indicate there is a cosy relationship between the Commission and Big Pharma. Numerous meetings are held between the two sides, without any input from public health advocates or campaigners against poverty. And I was particularly interested to learn that some emails journalists send to the Commission are passed on to the drugs industry.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the correspondence is the inconsistency in it. While Big Pharma does everything to thwart competition from cheaper generics, it still sucks up to the EU hierarchy by proclaiming its commitment to “competitiveness” at every opportunity. In one 2010 letter EFPIA’s Andrew Whitty wrote: “The challenge is to find a policy approach that delivers fast access to medicine, enhanced competitiveness, balanced budgets and reward for innovation.”
Call me old-fashioned but I believe health care is about trying to make sick people recover or – in terminal cases – relieving their pain. The logic of profit and loss, of competitiveness and balanced budgets should be viewed as irrelevant in this debate, especially when it relates to the world’s poorest.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 17-23 April 2011
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