About CAFTA
CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Agreement) is a proposed trade agreement between the United States, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Honduras that would eliminate tariffs and other barriers to trade in goods, agricultural services, investment and the imposition of intellectual property rights on medicines.
We are concerned that CAFTA, as it's currently written, would pose a threat to the lives of millions of Central Americans, particularly individuals living with HIV/AIDS. The trade agreement would place limitations on the compulsory licensing laws, which allow governments to authorize themselves or a third party to produce a cheap, generic version of a patented product, including drugs such as antiretrovirals used to control the HIV virus. The trade agreement would also threaten the lives of Central Americans by requiring generic drug manufacturers to redo clinical trials in order to obtain marketing approval and force them to postpone using the trial results for brand-name company drugs for five years. These changes could create patent-like barriers to generic drugs, even where no patented version exists.
With the exception of the Caribbean, Honduras and Guatemala have the highest per-capita HIV-rates in the hemisphere.
The current cost per patient for generic antiretroviral medications in Guatemala is about $400 per year. If CAFTA gets adopted as is, that cost will rise astronomically to roughly $10,000 per patient per year. Needless to say, the price increase would effectively place these life-saving drugs out of reach of many of the people who need them to stay alive.
More Information
Below are links to some other organizations that are working on CAFTA - visit their web sites to learn more about this issue and their efforts to oppose the trade agreement in its current form.
Citizen's Trade Campaign - http://www.citizenstrade.org/
Public Citizen - http://www.citizen.org/trade/cafta/
Health GAP - http://www.healthgap.org/camp/ftaa.html |
