Medicine free trade deal expanded by major pharma countries
The EU has approved a third revision of the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) Pharma-GATT Agreement, removing import duties on 1,290 more pharmaceuticals and medicine ingredients traded between major manufacturing countries.
The EU has approved a third revision of the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) Pharma-GATT Agreement, removing import duties on 1,290 more pharmaceuticals and medicine ingredients traded between major manufacturing countries.
This agreement was originally framed in 1994, and has been updated twice to account for technical progress and expand its scope. With the latest revision, 7,329 pharmaceutical products and ingredients will become duty-free. The EU, the United States and Switzerland are now covered and Japan should apply its terms later this year.
Welcoming its formal adoption by EU ministers, EU trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said: 'It is a show of confidence in the global competitiveness of the EU pharmaceutical industry, and a signal of our commitment to ensuring that the modern trading environment is in step with innovation.'
The latest revision particularly focused on biotechnology, where - said a Commission note - 'due to recent and continuous scientific developments..new pharmaceuticals and chemical intermediates were not covered.' The European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) estimates that the savings generated by the agreement for EU pharmaceutical companies will be e230m for 2007. There has also been an attempt to simplify the agreement, expanding and clarifying prefixes and suffixes used with pharmaceutical names to describe derivatives.