Abstract
BackgroundThe Regional Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) is a mega regional trade agreement signed by fifteen countries on 15 November 2020 after 8 years of negotiation. Signatories include the ten members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus China, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Australia. India was a negotiating party until it withdrew from the negotiations in November 2019. The RCEP negotiations were initially framed as focused on the needs of low income countries. Public health concerns emerged however when draft negotiating chapters were leaked online, revealing pressures on countries to agree to intellectual property and investment measures that could exacerbate issues of access to medicines and seeds, and protecting regulatory space for public health. A concerted Asia Pacific civil society campaign emerged in response to these concerns, and in 2019, media and government reporting suggested that several of these measures had been taken off the table, which was subsequently confirmed in the release of the signed text in November 2020.ResultsThis paper examines civil society and health actors’ views of the conditions that successfully contributed to the removal of these measures in RCEP, with a focus on intellectual property and access to medicines. Drawing on twenty semi-structured qualitative interviews with civil society, government and legal and health experts from nine countries participating in the RCEP negotiations, the paper reports a matrix of ten conditions related to actor power, ideas, political context and specific health issues that appeared to support prioritisation of some public health concerns in the RCEP negotiations.ConclusionsConditions identified included strong low and middle income country leadership; strong civil society mobilisation, increased technical capacity of civil society and low and middle income negotiators; supportive public health norms; processes that somewhat opened up the negotiations to hear public health views; the use of evidence; domestic support for health issues; and supportive international public health legislation. Lessons from the RCEP can inform prioritisation of public health in future trade agreement negotiations.
Highlights
The Regional Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) is a mega regional trade agreement signed by fifteen countries on 15 November 2020 after 8 years of negotiation
The analysis focuses on conditions which supported the removal of TRIPS Plus measures on pharmaceuticals, several informants reflected on dynamics they saw as shaping the opposition to patents on seeds in UPOV 1991 and on including investor-state dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS) in the agreement
Informants noted that initial leaked draft RCEP intellectual property (IP) text indicated proposals for least developed countries (LDC) to sign on to TRIPS Plus provisions as soon as they graduated from LDC status, yet LDC negotiating officials they spoke to seemed unaware of the implications
Summary
The Regional Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) is a mega regional trade agreement signed by fifteen countries on 15 November 2020 after 8 years of negotiation. The inclusion of intellectual property (IP) protections in bilateral and regional trade agreements can negatively impact access to generic medicines (i.e. non-originator medicines) through the extension of pharmaceutical monopolies [1,2,3]. This public health issue has received significant global attention leading to affirmations in the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health that countries have the right to interpret global IP rules ‘to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all’ [4]. There is a growing body of literature analysing the negative impact of these provisions on access to medicines through delays to the timely entry of generic medicines [11,12,13,14].1 For example, a study of the impact of IP measures introduced in Jordan after signing the US-Jordan FTA determined delays to the market entry of generic medicines estimated to cost 18 million US dollars in 2004 alone [1]
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