A leaked draft of a new free trade deal between India and the European Free Trade Association spurred fears that India had agreed to impose more stringent intellectual property laws on its pharmaceutical industry. But the Indian government recently clarified it had rejected those IP demands, which would limit the capacity of its vast generic market to produce cheap drugs.
The trade deal with the four-nation bloc — consisting of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland — is expected to be finalized in the next few days. But clauses in the leaked draft agreement relating to patents on India’s pharmaceutical products prompted criticism from activists and civil society groups over provisions that would limit the use of data from existing drugs for a period of at least six years, delaying the production of lifesaving drugs and pushing up prices globally.
The leak was the latest in a series of trade agreement proposals which go a step beyond the standard international obligations under the World Trade Organization’s 1995 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property, or TRIPS, agreement, to which India is a signatory. So-called TRIPS-plus provisions have increasingly cropped up in bilateral trade negotiations in recent years. As part of these provisions, pharmaceutical companies try to lengthen IP protections and secure the industry additional profit.