Bangladesh pharmaceutical industry won't be ready to implement TRIPS by 2016

[Nahian Fyrose Fahim]

Bangladesh is a country of 155 million. Although the country has made a good progress in the socio-economic field - increasing the literacy rate, improving life expectation, increasing food production, decreasing infant mortality and total fertility - poverty reduction progress is very slow. Macro-economic growth could not help reducing poverty and income inequality. According to the World Bank, less than $2 per day income is considered as absolute poverty and in Bangladesh, the percentage of the population living on less than $2 is 76.5 per cent (World Bank, 2010). Bangladesh's HDI index is 0.50 which indicates the position of 146 out of 187 countries. According to preliminary report on HIES 2010, poverty estimated at 31.5 per cent (based on upper poverty line), 17.6 per cent (based on lower poverty line), the Gini co-efficient of income is 0.458 and Gini co-efficient of consumption expenditure is 0.321.

The per day income of 76.5 per cent people of the country is below $2 and it is difficult to ensure their access to medicines at higher prices. Moreover, the medicines of diseases such as HIV/AIDS, avian flu, Hepatitis C, Aplastic anemia, cancer, heart diseases are very expensive.

TRIPS can affect the access to medicine in multiple ways. The most expected affect is direct because implementing patent rights increases the price of all types of medicines. There are basically two types of patent rights: 1) those that protect methods of manufacture (process patent) and 2) those that protect pharmaceutical products (product patent). In both cases, pharmaceutical farms are bound to pay a heavy portion to the patent holder when TRIPS is fully implemented. As a result, their production cost rise and they will recover their increased production cost by increasing the medicine price.

It is apparent that present research and development infrastructure and the technology of Bangladesh pharmaceutical industry are not as developed as in developed country. Moreover, the opportunity and fund for research is inadequate. There is hardly any possibility that the country's pharmaceutical sector would be able to increase fund, develop R&D facilities and research opportunities to the world standard by January 2016 in compliance with the TRIPS agreement. The present situation is not suitable for Bangladesh to implement the TRIPS agreement as scheduled.


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