The law: Patent the process only not products
Thursday December 20 2018
People who had submitted proposals in pursuit of patents for their pharmaceutical products have been advised to revise their proposals to exclude claims to patent the product and retain claim for process patents.
Rwanda and Uganda have amended their laws to remove a clause that allowed local inventors to patent pharmaceutical products.
People who had submitted proposals in pursuit of patents for their pharmaceutical products have been advised to revise their proposals to exclude claims to patent the product and retain claim for process patents.
But experts are having none of it, saying this is part of concerted efforts by powerful multinational companies to disempower African pharmaceutical industries.
“When countries change their laws like this it leads to negative outcomes; it is disempowering to the local pharmaceutical industries. You have to look at the pros and cons of a move like this,” said John Kabare, the intellectual property operations executive for the African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO).
He pointed a finger at powerful pharmaceutical corporates with a lot of money and access to higher levels of government.
“They now want to go further than what they have done in Rwanda or Uganda; now they want us to amend the Harare protocol so we completely remove pharmaceuticals from the patentable products at the African level,” he said.
He said instituting prohibitive laws further handicaps traditional knowledge, which includes traditional medicines, one of the few areas where Africa has strength.
Already, the continent suffers from limited capacity in technology and resources to do research and invent pharmaceutical and cosmetic products.
“For drugs, patents are just one aspect. There are many barricades along the entire chain. There are some drugs that are already off patent in Africa,” he added.
He said the big corporations offer those drugs under trial to be manufactured in Africa, for free to African governments.
“At one time Zimbabwe had started making HIV drugs, but when these pharmaceuticals heard that, they offered to give these drugs to the government for free,” he noted.
However, Ruhima Mbaraga Blaise, the division manager intellectual property office of Rwanda’s Registrar General said the government amended the patent law to remove pharmaceutical products because the process of drug patentability requires skills, money and technology which Rwanda, like many low developed countries, lacks.
He said the government viewed pharmaceutical products as an area that touches on public health.
Having one person have monopoly over a drug might be risky because the owner might decide to make it unaffordable yet it is needed by the public.
Christopher Kiige, an intellectual property consultant from Kampala, said the acute skill and capacity gaps is partly why the continent still holds onto to foreign corporations.
“For the time being, we need to protect the foreign pharmaceutical corporations so we can copy from them,” he observed.
“Mexico started by not allowing drug patents, but later they opened them up after they got capacity,” he added.
He noted that African countries earlier signed a bad Trade related aspects of intellectual property (TRIPS) deal, which gave African countries uniform intellectual property rights with the developed countries, which has come back to bite them.
“All drugs are made outside the continent and these countries are ruthless, they sell the drugs to us expensively, countries have asked for flexibilities but this wont happen until 2033.”