As a major secret, in October 2015, Mexico signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). TPP is composed by 5 American countries (“the giant of the North”, Canada, Chile, Mexico and Peru), and 7 from Asia (Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, Australia, New Zeland, Japan and Singapur), gathering a population of 800 million, and 30% of world produced wealth.
The acceptance of TPP by Peña Nieto’s government was critized by an important entrepreneur sector, stating they do not see any benefit in it for national capitals’ companies; on the contrary, one of the main favored industries is automotive -of transnational capitals-, as this agreement will boost exportations to the USA. As a condition, the United States’ government demanded Mexico to open the market to the USA farmaceutical business. What kind of effects will this have for our economy and society?
Although the automotive industry will impress some dynamics to Mexican foreign trade, it is worth to mention this will not create jobs or raise our salaries. On the contrary, new investments in this industry will be accompanied by the construction of facilities with imported materials and workforce, which will reduce even more the national inputs required to produce vehicles -currently, motors and other automotive parts are imported already with added value-. The central bet is for Mexico’s strategic geographical localization to make USA automotive companies to “successfully face” the Japanese concurrence in its own territory.
Talking about the farmaceutical industry, it is a short-term raid in the national market. TPP recognizes the right of these companies to extend the validity of their licences, undermining generic medicines -which are less expensive-, so there will be a progressive raise of the prices of medicines destined to treat diverse diseases (like cancer, diabetes, or HIV). Those companies will also implement patent rights (or monopoly right) to the elaboration of diagnosis and treatments, avoiding its dissemination over the medical assistance field as a whole.
There is also a risk for the alternative medicine (to the one given by our North neighbor’s transnationals) to be punished through bills, to difficult its social use; like this, homeopathic medicine, considered enemy of the brands promoting allopathic medicine, will be limited by operative rules, which will restric its existance in the national market.
Traditional herbal medicine will suffer the same fate, as its use and consuption are strongly disseminated in wide urban and rural popular sections. In this case, the plan is to turn illegal the public centers of distribution or sale of all kind of healing herbs, as much as the hindering, through all kind of regulations, of medical assistance based on healing herbs’ treatments.
The healing tradition of “Mexico Profundo” is under risk of being extermined by the powerful USA farmaceutical industry. This is one possible negative consequence to our country -among others, less relevant- of TPP.
***
Originally Published in La Resistencia #13 – February 13th, 2016.
Translation: Sofía Ballack
