HIV/Aids drugs will soon be priced out of reach of the poor

The adoption of an order-by-order approach, MSF said in a 2006 analysis, prevented generics suppliers from achieving economies of scale through mass production.

Making Trips effective

The 2003 deal was “not an easy mechanism in the first place, but it is the mechanism we have,” observes Tenu Avafia, a UN specialist on intellectual property and AIDS.
For this reason advocates are following Canada’s efforts to make the Trips compromise effective. Canada was among only a handful of countries to amend its laws to allow local companies to export drugs under the accord.

The legislation was passed in 2004 and became law the following year.

Canada is also the only country to actually ship an order of medicine under the agreement’s terms, an order of ARVs from the Canadian generics company Apotex to the Rwandan government.

But according to Richard Elliott, executive director of the non-governmental Canadian HIV/Aids Legal Network, the process revealed flaws in Canada’s legislation.

“They started with an imperfect model at the WTO and made it less perfect. Canada can make its own legislation more workable.”

The requirement that companies have a firm order before seeking a compulsory licence was one problem, Mr Elliott says. Provisions that require new licences for each order, he notes, “are user-unfriendly.

This is not how governments buy drugs. Nor is it how the pharmaceutical industry operates.”

The steps needed to produce drugs for export under the law, Dr. Clark said, “are simply too difficult and complicated. As it is currently written, we will not use it again.”

United Nations Africa Renewal — www.un.org