Agreement on a far-reaching trade accord eluded negotiators for a dozen Pacific Rim nations on Saturday as the US and Australia remained divided over commercial protections for drug companies, leaving tired and testy trade ministers to agree to a last round of talks yesterday.
The impasse over protections for advanced brand-name drugs prompted negotiators to put off settling a separate dispute over dairy exports. So the two issues, drugs and dairy products, became the final obstacles to concluding the largest regional trade agreement in history, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP), after seven years of talks.
The long-simmering drug debate concerns biologics, advanced medicines derived from living organisms and believed to hold promise in treating cancer.
The US and the pharmaceutical industry, not typically a US President Barack Obama administration ally, have fought for companies to have exclusive rights to their research data for an extended period before the information is released and can be used to produce less costly generics. They argue that such protection is needed to give companies a financial incentive to innovate and produce new drugs.
The US reduced its demand to eight years of exclusive data rights from the level in federal law, which is 12 years, but that was still too long for Australia and its allies, including Chile, New Zealand, Peru and Malaysia. Those nations’ laws allow zero to five years of monopoly protection.
On their side are the generic-drug industry and some non-profit organizations that support speeding affordable drugs to the market as quickly as possible.
Representatives for Doctors Without Borders, which has medical operations in up to 70 mostly poor nations, worked the halls at the hotel here where negotiators have been meeting behind closed doors since Wednesday.
“The main goal of the industry,” Judit Rius Sanjuan said, is “to deny generic competition and make prices higher.”
On the dairy issue, Canada, in particular, was pitted against the US and New Zealand, among others. The matter is especially sensitive for Canada because it holds federal elections in less than two weeks. Its agriculture industry and farmers are angry about competition from Europe in the wake of a separate trade agreement between their country and the EU. Canada and other dairy-exporting nations, including the US, were not eager to agree to provisions opening their markets without reassurance that a comprehensive deal was at hand.
Despite the divisions over politically charged issues, what has kept the trade ministers going is the knowledge of how much they have agreed to tentatively.
A final agreement would include 30 chapters covering different trade sectors and subjects and all but two of those — the ones that would include the terms of market access for dairy exports and intellectual property protections for pharmaceutical drugs — are all but finished.
However, as trade negotiators like to say, nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.
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