PHM-Exch> Is the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement affecting health policies?

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: South Centre <south at southcentre.org>

*By Martin Khor*
*Executive Director of the South Centre. ** *

  EXCERPTS

Are big companies making use of trade and investment agreements to
challenge health policies?  Evidence is building up that they do so, with
medicine prices going up and tobacco control measures being suppressed.

The Trans- Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) is very likely going to
cause the prices of generic medicines to go up

Do we need to defend existing policies on patents and medicines, and if we
don’t agree with some of the terms, we can choose not to sign?

Trade agreements and health concerns are linked because some companies
selling tobacco, medicines and food are using these agreements to sue
governments that introduce new regulations to safeguard public health.

The World Health Organisation’s Director-General Dr Margaret Chan recently
noted that corporate interests are preventing health measures.

The costs of non-communicable diseases are shooting up.  The costs for
advanced cancer care are unsustainable, even in rich nations, and some
countries spend 15 percent of the health budget on diabetes.

“In the developing world, the cost of these diseases can easily cancel out
the benefits of economic gain,” she said.  It is harder to get people to
adopt healthy lifestyles because of opposition by “unfriendly forces”.

“Efforts to prevent non-communicable diseases go against business
interests. And these are powerful economic operators. It is not just Big
Tobacco anymore. Public health must also contend with Big Food, Big Soda
and Big Alcohol. All of these industries fear regulation and protect
themselves by using the same tactics,” said Dr Chan.

Those tactics include “front groups, lobbies, promises of self-regulation,
lawsuits and industry funded research that confuses the evidence and keeps
the public in doubt.”

Many studies show how trade agreements with the United States or Europe
have raised the prices of medicines because of the constraints placed by
the FTAs’ strict patent rules on the sale of cheaper generic medicines.
Patients have had to switch to much dearer branded medicines.

One study estimated that Colombia would need to spend an extra US$1.5
billion a year on medicines by 2030, or else people would have to reduce
medicine consumption by 44 per cent by that year.

Another study showed that the patent provision in the US-Jordan FTA
resulted in a hospital increasing its medicine spending six-fold, and
medicine prices in Jordan have already increased 20% since 2001 when the
FTA began.

“Data exclusivity”, one of the features of the FTA, has delayed the
introduction of cheaper generic versions of 79% of medicines launched by 21
multinational companies between 2002 and mid-2006 and ultimately the higher
medicine prices are threatening the financial sustainability of government
health programs.

The tobacco industry is also making use of trade and investment agreements
to challenge governments’ tobacco control measures.

According to an article by Professor Mathew Portefeld of Georgetown
University Law Centre, the company Philip Morris has asked the US
government to use the TPPA to limit restrictions on tobacco marketing.

In comments submitted to the US trade representative (USTR), Philip Morris
argued that Australia’s plain packaging regulations would be “tantamount to
expropriation” of its intellectual property rights, and complained of the
broad authority delegated to Singapore’s Minister of Health to restrict
tobacco marketing.

In order to address these “excessive legislative proposals,” Philip Morris
urged USTR to pursue both strong protections for intellectual property and
inclusion of the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism in the TPPA.

The company has instituted legal cases against Uruguay and Australia for
requiring that cigarette boxes have “plain packaging”, with the companies’
names and logos disallowed.

These cases are under bilateral investment agreements.  The company claims
that the packaging regulations violate its right to use its trademark, and
also violate the agreement’s principle of “fair and equitable treatment”.

It claims that a change in government regulation that affects its profits
and property is an “expropriation” for which it should be compensated.

Under such agreements, companies have sued governments for millions or even
billions of dollars.  An oil company was awarded over US$2 billion in a
recent case against Ecuador.

The provisions in the bilateral investment treaties are also present in
trade agreements including the TPPA, including that companies can directly
sue the governments in an international court, under an investor-state
dispute system.

Having been sued by the tobacco company for its health measure, Australian
government has decided not to enter any more agreements that have an
investor-state dispute system.

In fact, in the TPPA negotiations, Australia has asked that it be granted
an exemption from that agreement’s investor-state dispute system.  So far
such an exemption has not been agreed to.

The controversies over how trade and investment agreements are threatening
health policies will not go away, because the rules are still in place, and
in fact new treaties like the TPPA are coming into being.

A “google search” on this issue will yield hundreds, indeed many thousands
of documents.  And the number will go up as long as the controversy
continues.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://phm.phmovement.org/pipermail/phm-exchange-phmovement.org/attachments/20130813/3aa05e07/attachment.html>