The UK Wants A Trade Deal With India That Would Boost The Already Healthy Profits Of Big Pharma, And Cause Millions Of People To Sicken

Patents

from the devastating-impact dept

Although trade deals are nominally about, well, trade, BestNetTech readers know that they have become an important way to force through changes in areas like copyright and patents without any meaningful democratic scrutiny. That’s because trade deals are negotiated in secret, and then presented as done and dusted once talks have been concluded. The argument typically rolled out is that it was “necessary” to make various concessions in the area of copyright and/or patents in order to obtain a deal, and that now the final text has been agreed, nothing can be done about it.

That’s certainly how things developed in the case of three major trade agreements covered by BestNetTech in recent years — ACTA, TTIP and TPP — and looks to be true of a new UK-India trade deal under discussion. Being able to negotiate trade agreements independently, rather than as part of the EU, was supposed to one of the big benefits of Brexit, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Although plenty of trade deals have been signed between the UK and other nations, they are almost without exception “rollover” deals: that is, they merely continue the trade terms that were already in place when the UK was part of the EU. The really important new trade deals that Brexiters promised — with the US and China — show no signs of materializing, for various political reasons. That leaves India as the only major market where the UK has some hope of agreeing a new deal.

Sadly, the UK is trying to use these negotiations to force through some really bad changes to India’s patent laws. As usual, we only know this thanks to the leak of the relevant chapter of the UK-India Free Trade Agreement. A letter from health and development NGOs to the UK’s International Trade Secretary spells out the harmful ideas revealed there, including:

A greenlight for ‘evergreening’ patents for medically inconsequential changes, allowing pharmaceutical corporations to extend their monopolies and keep prices artificially high for years beyond the end of the original 20-year patent term.

Closing down the opportunity to block unjustified patents before they are granted, meaning more products will be awarded unjustified patent monopolies.

New monopoly protections on the clinical data used to prove a medicine is safe and effective, delaying the advancement of medical science by blocking others from using this evidence to produce generic medicines.

As the letter emphasizes, these proposals would undermine the public health safeguards that India has implemented in its patent laws. They would also have a devastating impact on the health of millions of people in developing economies, for whom India’s low-cost versions of key drugs are literally a matter of life or death:

India’s long standing ability to produce quality-assured, affordable medicines for HIV, TB, viral hepatitis, malaria and other diseases, medicines that save millions of lives globally every year, relies upon its carefully drafted intellectual property laws and medical regulatory processes which balance the monopoly rights of manufacturers with everybody’s right to health.

It’s disappointing to see the UK use its much ballyhooed “Brexit freedom” to push for a trade deal that would boost the already healthy profits of its own pharma industry, whilst causing millions of people around the world to sicken and suffer unnecessarily.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or Mastodon.

Filed Under: acta, big pharma, brexit, china, evergreening, india, intellectual monopolies, patents, tpp, ttip, uk, us