Secretive Free Trade Agreements -- Implications for the Country

The Free Trade Agreements that India is negotiating has serious implications for Indian agriculture, food and access to medicines and industry. If proper protection is not taken, FTAs through exceptions, it will act as the floor in all trade negotiations, effectively subverting our position in WTO. These negotiations -- currently on with EU, Japan and Israel are being done without any public knowledge and without taking the state governments and the parliament into account.

Newsclick is publishing some of the documents in the negotiations on IP. We do not know whether they are the correct version or not, but they have serious implications for India.

To take a look at the text see:

IPR-India-EU_trade_agreement.pdf

IPR-India-Japan_economic_Agreement.pdf

Background:

Intellectual Property (IP) is back on the negotiating table between India and developed countries in trade negotiations. If India accepts EC and Japan demands on IP it affects agriculture, access to knowledge, domestic production of medicines and other key areas.

IP is also reflected in the investment chapter of the EU India text and Japan India text as well but that is not available in the public domain. Therefore we need to keep in mind that there needs to be a disclosure of the investment chapter for a complete analysis of the impact of proposed IP provisions in FTA negotiations.

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