Pills. Kandy Talbot/Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal is causing quite a stir around the world, and for good reason. There are multiple pro-corporate provisions within this massive trade deal that certainly merit being labeled “profit over people.” One of these is the Investor-State dispute settlement, which gives foreign corporations the ability to sue governments if a new law or regulation has effects on their profit rate; a blatantly pro-investor mechanism. Beyond this, intense criticism has also been provoked by some generous giveaways for the pharmaceutical industry.
Provisions within the deal would expand patent rights for big pharmaceutical companies, which would keep important medicines overpriced around the world. One of these provisions, “patent term extensions,” would allow companies to extend their patents beyond the original twenty years, preventing other companies from bringing the medicine onto the generic market, which generally lowers costs by 30-80 percent. Other provisions would allow companies to re-patent drugs after twenty years for developing “new uses” or slightly altering the chemical.
These handouts, which allow companies to hold legal monopolies on sometimes life-saving medicines, will cause preventable suffering and deaths around the world. This is especially true for the developing countries in Asia. For example, the Presidents Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR), which relies mostly on affordable generic drugs, would be forced to buy more expensive patent drugs and would greatly diminish access.
