Foreword

Foreword

Description

In most critical iconographies of iniquities of contemporary global regulatory governance, a prominent place is accorded to the complex regime of intellectual property law and its effects on universal affordable access to, and development of, essential medicines. The rules and supervisory institutions of the Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Agreement of 1994 (TRIPS), and the various “TRIPS plus” rules in a congeries of different bilateral and regional or plurilateral agreements including the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the draft Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), are explained in a familiar political account. In that narrative, the powerful governments of the North, themselves highly responsive to their major innovation creative industries including pharmaceutical companies, have by dividing and dragooning brought developing country governments to make agreements which increase local prices of pharmaceutical products without incentivizing local production capacity or investment in combatting major diseases other than those occurring in rich countries. The case studies and analysis in this highly original and indeed pathbreaking book do not so much challenge as look behind this overarching narrative to document, within a common conceptual framework, a highly variegated experience among eleven Latin American democracies with similar overall trajectories of movement from essentially no patent protection of pharmaceutical products in the 1980s to becoming, over the next two decades, compliant with TRIPS or TRIPS plus. These countries have varied not only in what they have sought and been able to achieve in relevant international negotiations and institutions, but also in very specific but significant features of the implementation and application of international rules in their national law and institutions (such as patent offices) allowing for greater or lesser access to medicines. As the country studies show, pro-access national intellectual property practices do not necessarily correlate with lower prices, let alone better health outcomes—much more is involved in achieving health improvements—but the variations and the explanatory factors presented in the rich and fine-grained studies by the contributors are of great interest and importance.

Source Publication

Balancing Wealth and Health: The Battle over Intellectual Property and Access to Medicines in Latin America

Source Editors/Authors

Rochelle C. Dreyfuss, César Rodríguez-Garavito

Publication Date

2014

Foreword

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