The negotiations surrounding the ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) agreement – a bill which purpose would have included the end of trade in dangerous counterfeit medicines - have brought with it many discussions. Many of these discussions concern intellectual property of music and video, but IDA Foundation’s Managing Director Edwin de Voogd also expressed his concerns to Radio Netherlands Worldwide about what ACTA developments could mean for affordable medicines in developing countries.

The ACTA is a controversial trade agreement negotiated by a handful of countries that seek to establish international standards for intellectual property right enforcement. The renewed ACTA treaty is currently awaiting approval of the European Union and has already been signed by the USA, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea.

IDA manages to keep prices affordable for developing countries, because we procure mostly generic medicines in India and China. This is currently enabled by earlier trade agreements between those countries and the EU. “The ACTA agreement is not in line with these previous trade agreements and could block this trade in the future. ACTA then only protects the position of the pharmaceutical industry, its patent laws and their monopoly position”. The consequences of signing this contract are immense and will have a huge impact on our customers in the developing world”, says Edwin de Voogd.

IDA customer MSF (Doctors without Borders) also recognises that implementation of ACTA can limit the availability of affordable, generic and quality medicines, for example for HIV/Aids or malaria, in developing countries. The irony is that this could increase prices of those medicines and in turn actually stimulate the production of counterfeit medicines.

The discussions will be followed closely by IDA Foundation and we will keep you updated.

To read the full article (in Dutch), please visit the website: http://www.rnw.nl/nederlands/article/acta-gaat-verder-dan-downloadverbod